Next up in our series of posts by PowerPoint's summer interns is Software Development Engineer Mike Rodgers. Hi there, I;m Mike Rodgers, and I;m mid-way through my twelve-week internship as a Software Development Engineer (or Dev for short) with the PowerPoint team. I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and I;ve spent the last four years out in California, studying Computer Science at Stanford University. I;m enrolled in a “Co-terminal” program, meaning that I;ll graduate with both a Bachelor;s and a Master;s in CS after five to six years total. My interview process was a bit simpler than Jesse;s and Nirav;s because I was already in the Bay Area. Microsoft paid for me to rent a car, I drove out to the campus, and interviewed with four or five of the developers. Something that really impressed me about the team was that they were quite organized and didn;t mess about for very long in making their decision. They had all the info they were going to get, and they must have sat down, talked about it,
Office 2007 Ultimate Key, and made a decision as soon as I left, because I got a call with the offer before I made it back to my dorm. I;ve been very pleased with my internship on the PowerPoint team. Microsoft makes very little distinction between interns and full-time employees. For the time that we;re here, we have the same privileges, security access, etc. as everybody else. And the other employees treat us just the same. The internship program also puts a lot of emphasis on the personal growth of the interns – you make a contribution to the company, but the company also makes a pretty big contribution to your development as a professional. When I was considering my different options for the summer, what really made the decision for me was everyone;s assurances that, if I worked at Microsoft, I;d get to work on a “real” project. They were telling the truth. I;ve had a variety of prior internships, and in almost all of them, I frequently felt that I was working as a code monkey on miscellaneous,
Windows 7 Enterprise Key, unrelated odds and ends—doing the grunt-work no one else wanted to do. Or, even worse, I felt like I was working on something that the team would kind of like to have at some point in the future but that may or may not ever get used. I;ve even had my boss seem flustered that she had to come up with something new for me to do because I had completed an assignment faster than she had anticipated. In my internship at Microsoft on the PowerPoint team, I was given a real problem of my own,
Buy Office 2010, and I;m writing code that is interesting,
Office Pro Plus 2007, important, and that will ship with the next version of PowerPoint. It;s pretty exciting that millions of people will be using something I worked on. Working at the SVC campus does mean there are fewer interns around, but it;s certainly got its perks. As Jesse said, the weather is unbeatable. (I actually commute by bike five days a week.) Also,
Office 2007 Enterprise Key, Silicon Valley is an exciting place to be for techie people of a college age. A couple weeks ago, a bunch of the MS SVC Interns took on the Google Interns in a game of laser-tag. Someone needs to show them they don;t hold dominion in The Valley… <div