Concepta's Explore internship Experience

To support our communication throughout our remote internship, my teammates and I set up daily team meetings as interns to use for our pod standups to discuss our progress based on our weekly goals and any blockers we are experiencing. These pod meetings have been a great time to ask about the different tasks we complete asynchronously. Additionally, we set up a team chat channel to post any questions we have outside our daily pod meetings. Our team's chat channel has been helpful to me because I often face bugs that one of my teammates has resolved, and asked my teammates saves me a lot of time trying to figure out how to debug my code. Although I currently face no challenges communicating with my teammates after starting the chat channel and daily meeting, I had challenges before these innovations. I found it hard to give my teammates feedback, especially when one of our teammates is not taking an equal share of the project workload. By having an intern-exclusive meeting, we hav...

This week, we moved from the project development part of my internship to the software engineering part. In preparation for the engineering portion of the internship, we took some C++ courses and general introduction courses to learn Microsoft's coding guidelines. Since we were looking at industry-standard code written in C++ that is almost thirty-five years, my teammates and I expected a challenging week. Although all the tasks were something new and challenging, there was a task that I would regard as the core task for the project that my teammates were scared of taking on. This task required extensive research through the code base and a clear understanding of the different methods and how they relate to a significant part of our project. Without hesitation, I was quick to volunteer to take on the task during the task assignment session. I honestly did not know if I would accomplish what the task required or even where to begin, but I was determined to learn whatever was needed...

During the last five weeks of my internship, I have always been proactive in asking questions to understand the project requirements and openly discussing my design plans with my manager. First, I post daily standup updates to inform my manager and my internship mentors about the tasks I worked on or plan to work on and any blockers I am facing. At the start of the internship, I found it hard to remember the different tasks I completed the previous day, and I did not include non-technical tasks like attending intern networking events. As a result, my virtual standups were not well-detailed to communicate my engagement with my internship project. I compared my virtual standup with other standups posted in my manager's Microsoft Teams chat from interns and full-time employees and learned how to improve my standup. Although my virtual standups have greatly improved over time, I have found it very challenging to write out what I work on because I have been ramping up and understanding ...

Last week, we concluded all our user interviews with Product managers and Excel customers. My internship project is to build a feature that enables users to open their Excel workbooks in the web application from the Desktop. During these interviews, we aimed at understanding how our feature will be helpful to Excel customers. First, we interviewed product managers because they are our first target audience. Most Excel products that involve collaboration and AI are always first shipped to the web version, iterated upon before they are shipped to other endpoints. Second, we interviewed excel customers since they will be the ones using the product, and we wanted to know if they have experienced a pain point of wanting to switch between Excel desktop and Excel web. After those interviews with my teammates, I developed two user scenarios of personas who would use our project feature and the value proposition of when our feature is useful. Additionally, we used Figma to design prototype des...

It has been a month since the start of my internship. This week we completed our work with the Project management aspect of the project. We concluded with a specification review session where different project managers reviewed our feature specification and gave us feedback about the different scenarios to consider and changes we should make to our feature plan. While preparing our project management specification, I enjoyed how different project managers were bouncing ideas off each other and the great insights they suggested for our project’s success. As a result, I want to learn more about project management because it is a field that I might want to work in for some time. Working through the process also made me appreciate the impact of thoughtful project management on understanding the different project requirements. Additionally, I think a good software developer is one with a product manager mentality, always keeping the customer needs at the core of the products developed. From...

During this week, we conducted user studies ranging from interviewing Product managers to general Microsoft Excel users to understand how implementing the Excel feature we will be working on during our internship will solve customers’ problems. I never knew that as a Computer Science major, I would ever have to interact with customers about the products I am working on. This week’s tasks were particularly challenging because conducting user interviews is something that my teammates and I had never done before.  Since we needed to schedule the interviews and prepare the interview questions for all the users, my team devised different ways to stay on track throughout the week-long interviews. First, we divided the interviews into three sections that we divided among the interns on my team, and we had daily stand-up meetings to discuss our progress with our tasks. My first daily stand-up was during my final project in the Cybersecurity course last semester. I liked how it supported di...

I am working in a pod of three Explore interns and three mentors. My teammates are all rising junior students, and my mentors consist of two project managers and a software engineer. It was surprising that all my pod mates were part of the same internship as last summer. Thinking about the user pain points we are solving is easier since we practiced the entire product life cycle during last summer's internship. My teammates are great communicators who enjoy talking through any ideas they have with the team to all participate in the decisions made. The effective communication among our team has made conversations around adopting healthy work hours for collaboration easy, even if we are all located in different time zones. We conducted ten user interviews this week to understand the problem that our internship project will be solving. The interviewing process included scheduling interviews with different product managers through emails and Microsoft Teams and attending a feedback se...

  Yesterday, I had a coffee chat with Jason, a Software Engineer 2 with Microsoft Excel. My manager recommended talking to Jason after requesting my manager for different Microsoft employees I could reach out to about having a great internship experience, work-life balance at Microsoft, and graduate studies at Microsoft. Going into the coffee chat, I was excited to learn about Microsoft during a one-on-one experience, and I had very many questions ranging from the projects that Jason has worked on to the ways Microsoft has supported his career trajectory. I was curious to learn about Jason's experience as a software engineer pursuing his Graduate studies alongside full-time employment. "What did you consider before deciding to do Graduate school after gathering work experience," I asked Jason. I was particularly interested in learning about how he decided when to pursue his Graduate education because I am constantly battling whether it is good to pursue Graduate school im...

One of the greatest lessons I learned from Berea College's labor program is not to be afraid to ask questions. For example, asking questions and receiving answers from my internship supervisors has been crucial in understanding my manager's requirements of the Microsoft Excel feature that my team will be building. Firstly, my experience as a Teaching Assistant with the Computer Science department taught me that asking questions does not mean I am dumb, as I initially thought. As a teaching Assistant, I always enjoy helping students ask questions because I regard asking questions as a sign of curiosity. Overcoming that fear of being considered dumb has helped me ask thoughtful questions to my managers and mentors. Through asking those questions, I have been able to clarify what they meant by specific Microsoft jargon or acronyms and my project requirements. Furthermore, working in teams during class projects, course team works, and as a Teaching Assistants at Berea College taugh...

Today, my teammates and I organized a coffee chat with former explore interns who now work as Product managers with Microsoft Excel. During that coffee chat, my primary questions were how they navigated the ambiguity of the internship. Unlike class projects that I have done at Berea College, I find the project requirements for my internship less clear, and hard to understand the exact project requirements. Furthermore, the path to follow to complete the project is equally undefined by my internship mentors and manager. As a result, I spent my entire first week confused about what our internship supervisor expected of our team regarding our internship project. To make my confusion more, neither my teammates nor I knew where to start. Since the internship is a combination of product management and engineering, my team decided to spend the first month developing the product specification before diving into the software engineering part of the project. With only four weeks dedicated to pro...

During the different orientation events, my internship mentors provided so many resources. Such a long list of resources was helpful and overwhelming because I did not know why I needed some resources. Unlike Computer Science courses that provide relevant resources with progressing levels of complexity, the resources provided at my internship were of varying complexities. It was a hard transition from class projects to my internship project. Additionally, during my meetings with my project management mentors, the requirements for the Project Management aspect of my team's product were very unclear, not explained in detail, and vague. The lack of clarity in the project requirements was notably different from my experiences in various classes because, most times, the specific project requirements are precise. Once I achieve these goals, then the project is regarded as successful. Unlike those classes, there are no project requirements lined out and no specific definition of success f...

  After my internship last summer, I learned so much about Microsoft and the support towards team collaborations. One of the most interesting aspect of the company’s support towards diverse teams was the fact that all product feature teams consist of a diverse group of engineers, product managers, and UI designers. As an excel intern this summer, I will be working a team of three interns, one software engineer, and two product managers. This is exciting for me because I will get to learn so much from all my teammates. Moving into this internship, I bring my experience of being a good team player that I have developed as I worked on different team projects at Berea College. Through working on these different projects in diverse teams, I have acquired skills of navigating different team dynamics, encouraging all teammates to utilize their strengths and supporting each other’s weaknesses for the success of the projects. I plan to apply these skills to my internship project. However, I...