● Before starting your internship, what questions did you have? How have you addressed those questions? What questions do you still have? How do you plan to address these?

Before starting my internship, I was curious to know the Microsoft work culture. To fully answer my questions, I planned to have coffee chats with Microsoft employees, technical and non-technical. Additionally, I planned to join Microsoft Employee Resource groups and attend networking events to learn about and experience the company’s work culture.
From my involvement in these different events, I have learned that Microsoft has a strong culture of supporting its employees and encouraging employees to support each other. Throughout my internship, I have had to cold message or email many full-time employees requesting guidance on the Getting started Project that interns do to understand how the Excel codebase works and my internship project. The full-time employees are very responsive and willing to help until the problem is resolved. 

At the start of my internship, I remember sending a cold Microsoft Teams message to an employee who wrote an assignment in the Getting started Project about an error I was facing with some systems tests. We had a back-and-forth chat about the problem, but all the recommendations did not seem to work, so we just made a Microsoft Teams call and worked through the problem. It is helpful to know that I am not judged when I ask, and people are very willing to help.
With just six weeks in my internship, it is early to say that I have entirely understood Microsoft’s culture. “How do Microsoft employees maintain a healthy work-life balance?” I am still wondering. Moving forward, I plan to organize more coffee chats with employees to get this question answered.