SWE Intern at Microsoft

Meet Prakriti from CSE department who bagged a Summer Internship at Microsoft, Hyderabad as an SWE Intern. Gaining hands-on experience with the software development life cycle to building knowledge in authentication and security practices while sharping her communication and collaboration skills through team interactions, Prakriti's experience has been a gamut of learning. Dive in to gain further insights!

Introduction

I’m Prakriti Tripathi, a 4th year UG student in the CSE department of IIT Dharwad. I’m interested in the field of AI/ML and software development. I enjoy playing basketball and the piano in my free time.

Where did you do your internship and what was the domain?

I was an SWE (Software Engineer) intern at Microsoft, Hyderabad.

How did you find/secure this internship?

My roommate told me about this opportunity. It was on Microsoft’s job portal (careers.microsoft.com) .

What was your typical day like during the internship?

• I’d reach office between 9 am to 10 am, grab a snack or coffee, and head to my cubicle. I’d then start working on the task assigned to me, which usually involved a lot of brainstorming, coding, searching the web for resources and copilot.

• Then there was a daily team meeting at 11.30 am where everyone would share their progress and what tasks they were working on next. This was followed by team lunch where we would all get something from the cafeteria and have an informal, fun chat.

• After lunch, we would go for a stroll around the campus. After this I’d get back to work until around 5 pm and then leave.

Overall Experience

• My role was software engineer intern. The project I worked on was from the AI platform team and basically involved creating a backup cronjob service for one of their new routing algorithms.

• I learnt a lot about the entire software development life cycle, seeing my code go from local development to being deployed on the production pipeline.

• I also learnt about authentication and security tools and practices.

• Apart from technical skills, I improved my communication skills and learnt how to answer questions and ask them. I learnt a lot from talks by senior leaders on their experience. I also had fun virtually meeting other interns from around the world and making new connections.

What advice would you give to students preparing for internships?

• Try not to get overwhelmed by the amount of resources available online. I’d recommend you talk to a senior or a relative who is working in your domain and get resources from them.

• For your resume, try to have a couple of projects that you can talk about in depth. For SWE roles, you can check out the leetcode75 sheet, which has a nice set of problems covering all data structures.

• Also, don’t get stuck on trying to solve hard problems, most interviews are short (around 45 minutes) so the interviewers usually ask medium level problems.

• After you clear the OA, you can check out the behavioral section from the popular book, “cracking the coding interview” by Gayle.

• Also, please don’t ignore your college courses (and CPI). It will be useful for interview rounds where a lot of questions are an abstract version of what you learn in operating systems, databases or computer networks.

The views presented above are the blogger’s own and are not in any manner representative of the views of Drishti or IIT Dharwad in general.