My name is Malcolm Wright, and I am a third-year student at the University of Guelph. This blog will detail the goals I made for myself, and the plan I made to achieve these desired goals. Furthermore, this blog will go over my roles as an Explorer intern at Microsoft, and the skills I learned while working there during Summer 2021.
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology company which produces with computer software, consumer electronics, and personal computers. Founded in 1975, Microsoft began developing and selling BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800 and then moved on to MS-DOS. Microsoft Windows followed shortly after. Although I was remote, my office would have been in Redmond, Washington. I worked on the CRS Team under the Commerce + Ecosystems product group.
My goals for this work-term focused on making sure I step out of my comfort zone and be curious by taking initiative with asking questions/sharing opinions and learning new skill sets. As a direct consequence of these two goals, it would improve my performance allowing me to meet that goal I set for myself. Lastly, organizational skills are a must not only for the co-op term but for my career and life. Being organized helped me ask questions by documenting any roadblocks/questions and by understanding what I did on each day. This really helped me during our daily Stand-up meeting as I wouldn’t struggle to come up with notes. Looking back on these goals, I could have made another goal centered around networking with full-time employees and other interns outside of my team which I think went well during the internship. I was able to hear different perspectives and ask questions to higher-up employees such as my boss’s boss. In the future, I would like to network with more interns if possible!
We had two projects that we worked on during the internship. First, we needed to build two dashboards that showed the number of unpriced CSVs and Tokens respectively in our system and the total price of them in USD value. This was awesome as we learned how to use the Power BI platform, and I personally also learned more about HTTP responses. Before they were made, the process of determining the number and value of CSVs and Tokens was a manual process that took time away from the engineers on the team. It also provided a visual detailing each month how the CSVs and Token amounts were divided.
The second project would help this issue on our team where financial records will be dropped, and to recover them involves a large, manual process involving multiple tools done locally on the engineer’s machine. This project would be two separate tools that consolidate many tools into their own respective purpose. For example, the existing tool would be writing a bunch of JSON to text files and the next tool would read them in, so we would combine them together and just pass a list of strings containing that JSON. Reducing manual effort and automating part of the process will not only save time but can save any mistakes from happening. C# was a required skill for the project, and I learned them in high school.
As we were doing the final project, we also did some reprocessing ourselves to help take off the load of the engineers on the team. Learning how financial systems work and how they can have flaws in them was an interesting aspect to the job that I learned from my manager and others on the team. This co-op term was my first time ever using Agile and being in stand up, so I learned some of that too! Finally, we each had 4-weeks of being a PM, so I got to learn how that is versus being an engineer! These two roles used different skills, and both are critical for a team in their own ways.
You can check out more information about the internship program here.
During this work term, I learned a lot of skills and improved my interpersonal skills such as communication, time-management, collaboration, etc. This internship has helped me become a more self-aware person by recognizing the fact that I am more of an early bird who works best earlier in the day, and I am closer to an introvert who does better with small groups than large ones. I’ve established that I will start out as more of a software engineer early in my career, and I may switch to being a PM later in my career if the opportunity arises. The skills I learned this term will carry forward to future internships and into my career.
First, I want to thank everyone at Microsoft for seamlessly transitioning such a large in-person internship featuring many in-person events to an online internship that continued to impress me along the way! I want to thank Mark for being a great manager who consistently is transparent and knowledgeable. Also, I want to thank Kelvin for being a great mentor who spent a lot of time and effort answering questions and roadblocks that our intern pod faced. Thank you to Ahmad and Caroline who made up our intern pod, they are incredibly smart and personable. Thank you all for being friendly and happy to help with any question I would ask!