How I accomplished my three core internship goals
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 wrote a product specification that outlined the problem and different user scenarios that supported the need for our project feature. In the specification, I added sample prototypes of our project feature that I designed in Figma. I had never used Figma before my internship, so it was exciting to design a sample User experience in Figma.
With a thorough product specification, I started developing in my fifth week. Each member of the team chose a project task that we would work on in parallel. I was intentional about deciding a task about something completely new and challenging. Although it was overwhelming to understand how the different parts of my project task worked, I utilized the daily office hours to ask my mentor questions regarding my task. Additionally, I used Microsoft Excel's internal resources to read about the team's coding style, and I confidently asked for help from full-time employees that worked on similar projects.
Breaking my core goals into smaller action points that I practiced every day helped me accomplished my three major goals.
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 wrote a product specification that outlined the problem and different user scenarios that supported the need for our project feature. In the specification, I added sample prototypes of our project feature that I designed in Figma. I had never used Figma before my internship, so it was exciting to design a sample User experience in Figma.
With a thorough product specification, I started developing in my fifth week. Each member of the team chose a project task that we would work on in parallel. I was intentional about deciding a task about something completely new and challenging. Although it was overwhelming to understand how the different parts of my project task worked, I utilized the daily office hours to ask my mentor questions regarding my task. Additionally, I used Microsoft Excel's internal resources to read about the team's coding style, and I confidently asked for help from full-time employees that worked on similar projects.
Breaking my core goals into smaller action points that I practiced every day helped me accomplished my three major goals.
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