Surviving Week One - an intern's perspective

Being an intern is an opportunity. You are submerged into company, big or small, for a certain period. Your time with the company helps you make sense of all that stuff they taught you in school and teaches you even more. You learn about how a company works, how to apply your schooling to the real world and how to interact with other team members and other teams who are working to the same goals or other ones.

Being an intern at Microsoft is all that, and more.

It is information overload.

It is hard work.

   It is fast paced. Really fast paced.

But most of all it is rewarding. Even though you are only an intern being a part of the team for a short period of time, you are an active member of a team. Your team works together towards a common goal. At times there are interactions with other teams, other divisions or even partners outside of the company. You get exposed to a whole new set of skills school never even hinted to.

Now I am a Program Manager intern, so this will relate to mostly specific PM experiences but it will include experiences as an intern in general. Being that this is posted midway through my second week, I hope that gives you an idea of how big and exciting this has been so far. First week is almost already a blur (partially the reason I started writing this down!) but it was a great start to my 16 weeks here at Microsoft.

Now before beginning the internship, we were given a training plan that would be executed over our time here. After a brief skimming through the plan, it seemed as though the first 3 months would be training and such, and then the fourth month would finally be time for a project. It was apparent very early on, that training plan was not what will actually be happening.

Day 1 was orientation day. Being the excited new intern I was, I followed the email directions exactly and arrived at 8am. Once there, I was told the intern orientation started at 9:30am… An hour and a half later began a whirlwind of a day – consisting of papers, power point presentations and some really cool stuff. At the very end of the day we hopped on our appropriate shuttles (yes – you get shuttled around campus because there really is that many buildings) and got to meet some of the team for the last hour of the day. Only my manager was still in the building by the time I got there and we ended up having an hour and a half conversation trying to cover everything and anything about the team that might help me understand a little more what I would be doing here. At the end of the day I fell asleep so fast I don’t think I even got changed…

The rest of the week consisted of what they called ‘ramp-up’; getting up to speed with being a Microsoft employee, being an intern and being on your particular team. Everyone to answer any questions I had, pointed me towards appropriate resources and was incredibly patient as I sorted through this mass amount of knowledge I was receiving. Another intern started at the same time as I did (we even share an office) and we both went through the same ramp-up period. It became clear quickly that the training plan was not accurate and we would be starting our own project almost immediately. The rest of the week is a blur of meetings, sample documents, expectations and commitments. At the end of the first week, we planned our next two weeks along with the rest of the team now that we had a better understanding of what exactly we were getting ourselves into. As week 2 gets on its way, with even more meetings and documents and expectations, I am even more excited then I was when I received my internship offer. I hope to keep this updated with my weekly adventures, as I work on our project and try to take in as much as Microsoft is sending out.

[thepal] Just a quick note, due to technically difficultly setting up this blog as interns have to go through different hoops, this is actually posted just after my first month! The first three posts will be pretty close together, the rest of it will be space out correctly :)