Lesson from overcoming a challenge

 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, which required understanding many different tasks.

To overcome this challenge, I broke down my task into smaller, manageable sub-tasks. Then, I worked on the sub-tasks from least complex to more challenging. Additionally, I asked my manager for engineers who had worked on a similar task. Whenever I spent more than one hour figuring out something, I shared my attempted solutions with an area expert who advised me. 

From this challenge, I learned how to overcome getting overwhelmed by a task's complexity: breaking down large tasks into smaller manageable sub-tasks and working on the sub-tasks, progressing towards completing the whole task.