Concepta's Explore internship Experience

 My Explore internship experience consisted of two phases; Project Management and Software Development. I spent the first four weeks of my internship working through ideation to prototyping. During this phase, I conducted customer interviews to understand how Microsoft Excel customers faced my project's problem. After completing the interviews, I wrote developed a Figma design with various ideas of the problem solution.  Then, I compiled a product specification that highlighted the problem statement, user scenarios, prototype designs, and possible success matrices for the project. Although working through the Project Management phase was interesting, I discovered that I am more interested in software development. I enjoyed spending time thinking about how to implement a function or debugging code. It was new exciting challenges daily in the software development phase than in the Project Management phase.  During the summer of 2020, I had a Front-end internship where I wor...

 I spent most of the week reviewing comments on my code review and preparing for demo presentations of the end-to-end customer experience of our feature. During my last demo presentation, I remembered how overwhelmed I felt during my first week at the internship. Everything from understanding my project description, adjusting to work in Pacific Standard time when physically located in Berea, and trying to understand the meaning of the C++ code in Excel's codebase seemed a lot to understand. By taking one task at a time and reaching out to my mentors and manager whenever I needed help to understand something, I overcame my technical and non-technical challenges. One major challenge I faced during my internship was executing my second project task. My task was to enable customers to navigate to a specific sheet and cell in Microsoft Excel using deep linking. To deep-link to the customer's cell location, I worked with code from the front and back end of SharePoint's server, wh...

During the last two weeks, I talked to a couple of full-time employees to learn how Microsoft tests its software and a career option as a Software Test Engineer. Test engineers write software tests like unit tests, sub-system tests, scenario tests, and vendor tests. Unit tests are tests written to check how different functions or methods work at the lowest level of abstraction. During a conversation with a former Test engineer, I learned about Test-driven development, where test suites are developed before the actual development of the product. Although test-driven development is highly encouraged, some engineers write tests to verify their product's functionality after the coding. One importance of Test-driven development is fully understanding various edge cases to consider while developing. Sub-system tests are tests written to cover code shared between different components. A specific type of sub-system testing called cross-platform testing verifies how code behaves on other E...

At the start of my internship, I listed three primary goals: Writing a thorough product specification for the feature my team was adding to Microsoft Excel, exploring the Excel codebase and writing code to add the feature, and learning about Microsoft’s work culture. Although my technical goals were important, I wanted to know different aspects of Microsoft beyond software development that I would enjoy participating in if I became a full-time employee. Every intern at Microsoft must reflect on how they will contribute to the company’s diversity and inclusion core priority. In my first meeting with my manager, I highlighted how I planned to organize at least two coffee chats with full-time employees at Microsoft to learn about their experiences and its initiatives towards diversity and inclusion. Furthermore, I joined the Black At Microsoft Employee resource Group to interact with Black interns and full-time employees. In the tenth week of my internship, I got an opportunity to partici...

In the summer of 2021, I worked as an Explore intern with Microsoft Excel. The Explore internship combines Project management and software development, where a pod of three first or second-year college students gain end-to-end experience developing a product. My internship project was to add a feature that enables Excel Desktop customers to open their workbooks in Excel Online. In the Product Management phase, I interviewed six General Excel customers and eight product managers who work on features available in Excel online only. The interview aimed at understanding the customer pain points and scenarios when a customer would use our feature. After the interviews, I developed prototype designs using Figma and wrote a product specification for the project. In my fifth week of the internship, I organized a review session where six Product managers and my team’s mentors critiqued our product specification and suggested possible improvements before approving the sample designs for producti...

At the start of my internship, I had three core goals: To gain end-to-end experience building a technology product, adding an Open In Browser feature to Microsoft Excel, and learning about Microsoft's work culture. Under these goals, I set smaller goals like organizing weekly coffee chats with at least two Microsoft full-time employees, assigning myself challenging project tasks, and fully participating in the internship's product management and Software development phases. To gain an end-to-end experience, I fully emersed myself in learning about the product life cycle from ideation to production and re-iterating the whole process. During the first four weeks of the internship, I worked in a team of three interns to interview Excel customers to understand their pain points relating to the project. Additionally, in a team of three, I interviewed Project managers to understand the relevance of our feature when customers use web-exclusive features. After engaging in interviews, I...

Last week, Microsoft Excel held a week-long Fix Hack and Learn(FHL) event. Fix Hack and Learn is Excel’s hackathon where engineers choose different Excel problems they want to fix, hack or learn. Although it was a busy week preparing for my final internship presentations, I joined a team of three full-time employees to fix a problem with Excel’s Formulas. In Microsoft Excel, when a user types the equal signs in a cell and starts typing a name of an Excel formula or variable, a dropdown list of filtered displaying formulas and variables. It is easy to navigate this list using the keyboard arrows, and yet when a user presses Enter, there is a “#NAME” error that always displays. The Formula fix project aimed to enable the Enter key to select from the dropdown list. After the team leader pitched this idea, I was excited to work on a project solving a challenge I have faced in Excel before and a project that will impact billions of Excel users. After joining the team, I chose to work in Exc...