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Created October 30, 2014 18:19
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msft-interview.md

Microsoft Internship Advice from Maria

Initial

  • Good afternoon!
  • I'm from Redmond, WA and I study economics and computer science at NYU.

General

  • Smile!
  • Mention projects during interview questions!

Projects

  • Valentine's Day
    • ship quickly, 100 users, the effects lasted for months afterwards
  • Energy Sensing and Automation
  • pitches, user feedback, versatility
  • hardware and software
  • making a difference
  • attending the HotPower conference
  • Spartan research
    • reading other newsletters (DistArray example)
    • talking with the Bohrium team, TDD, examples and performance testing
    • making the API more consistent
  • Broome Website
    • enhancing community and releaving organization problems
  • Tech@NYU Grouper
    • kmeans group assignment
    • for my After Hours initiative, I want people to meet each other and build community
  • CitiBike
    • I had many questions!
    • Is the program worth it?
    • How much do I use it? Where do I go?

When answering questions

  • Smile!
  • break the problems down
    • e.g. usability, safety, human error, style/design
  • ask clarifying questions

Questions to ask during interview?

  • Can you please clarify?
  • Is this what you mean?
  • Am I still good on time?

Questions to ask afterwards?

  1. I really enjoyed having a mentor at my last internship. Does this internship offer a similar program / experience?
  2. What will the onboarding process be like?
  • How much ramp up time will I have?
  1. Do I get to work on anything that actually ships?
  2. Will I get to work with other teams? Interns?
  3. Will I have time to work on independent MSFT related work / projects?
  4. I heard that Microsoft has a shared research / coworking space (virtual or physical). Can you say anything more about that? I'm really excited for cross-team collaboration!

Potential Questions

Why Microsoft?

  • commitment to research and development
    • commercializing research. Talk about Tech@NYU and OSDI, about the ga between these two areas and why I'm interested in being the bridge.
  • commitment to open source
    • open sourcing C# and Mono
    • Visual Studios Tools
    • numerous open source research and non/research projects
  • cross-platform
    • Microsoft Band, PhoneGap / Cordova
  • Microsoft connects its products and services
    • Satya Nadella mentions that Kinect development feeds into other areas of the company
    • Technologies like Azure that enable a whole new class of products and services

Group Scenarios

  • I want to help the team in the best way possible. I initially joined Tech@NYU to run a hardware initiative. Everyone was excited for it, but then agreed that we had too many initiatives. I took over the After Hours initiative because I care about building community and I needed to step up and help the organization.
  • Last year I was the president of my CAS cohort, 40 of my peers. One of the responsibilities was to plan events for 1600 students with a team of 10 other presidents. I unofficially became the leader because I had a vision for the quality of the events that could be run and because I knew what we had to do to get there. I worked with all the sub-groups and incorporated their feedback to make this event great. My team needed a strong leader and I readily stepped up the challenge.

Elevator

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