Overview
My name is Helen, and I was an Explore intern at Microsoft the summer after my first year! The Explore intern role is a 12-week program designed for first- and second-year undergraduate students to explore two core tech disciplines—Software Engineer and Program Manager—at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Continue reading to find out more about my experience with landing the opportunity, my time as a Microsoft Explore intern, and my personal tips/advice/takeaways.
Application
Resume Format
I leveraged the popular Jake’s Resume Template. I modified the template slightly to change certain stylings and eliminate some extra white spaces. You can use any platform to generate your resume (LaTex, Microsoft Word, Canva, etc.), but you need to make your resume readable, even by parsing algorithms that may automatically perform resume screening (preferably PDF or Word).
If a human recruiter is looking at resumes, they typically have less than one minute to go through each one, so how to highlight yourself in this very short time frame becomes the core question.
- The order of the experiences you include matters a lot! Place your most impressive and/or relevant experiences at the top of the resume.
- In general, the resume should be one page in length for undergraduate students (especially true for the Explore program as it’s for beginners).
- Leverage different text styling but don’t overdo it such that text is unreadable. Use bold and underlining to emphasize different components of your experiences. For instance, bold the technologies used in a project to draw attention to your skills!
- Get feedback on your resume! I felt a bit insecure and/or scared asking other people to look at my resume at first, but looking back now, resume reviews are such a common thing in the community. Having a more experienced person look at your resume is the easiest way for you to take your resume to the next level. Reach out to family, older friends, anyone you know, or even the department for resources!
Resume Content
Typical sections breakdown for a tech resume and what I considered including.
- Education
- GPA if you think it makes you look smarter
- Any scholarships or awards you’ve received at school
- Relevant courses you’ve taken, but highlight the skills you learned from them rather than the course code and/or official name (e.g., putting ‘Python Programming’ may be more helpful than ‘CSC110’)
- I included my high school on the resume just because I took a few courses that I wanted to highlight
- Work Experiences
- Does NOT have to be paid as long as it’s relevant to tech
- I talked about previous research, internship, and volunteering experiences related to writing code
- Projects
- Anything you’ve worked on in your free time, at hackathons, or even for courses
- Highlight the technologies involved
- Activities and Leadership
- Experiences that demonstrate more soft skills (volunteering, clubs, etc.)
- Skills
- I almost didn’t include this section because I could only think of a handful
- Doing some searching on skills to include could help spark some ideas, you probably have more relevant skills than you can think of
Every experience on your resume must have at least one bullet point about the impact YOU made. In the ideal case, this impact should be quantified in some way. For instance, writing that you made a website with X regular users and Y daily views is a lot more useful than just saying you made a website.
Online Presence
Having a nice personal website and/or GitHub profile may help you stand out more in the screening process, especially nowadays when so many people have it. You are limited by the one-page length of your resume, but you can paint a more comprehensive narrative of yourself via a personal website.
I didn’t really know how to make websites before my first year, but there are a lot of templates out there to help. A quick search can get you a long way! Personally, I found it easiest to start with a pretty template, adapt it to my liking, and then deploy the site via Github Pages for free.
Interviews
Behavioral Phone Screen
A few hours after I submitted my application, I received an invite to schedule a phone screen. I had a 30-minute call with a recruiter a week later that was primarily behavioral with a few questions related to technical concepts.
The key tip here is to practice the STAR method! You should learn more about it if this sounds unfamiliar. It is a really efficient structure for answering any behavioural interview questions. In addition, be ready to provide more detail about any information you’ve given to Microsoft (e.g., anything on your resume, application, or personal website).
On top of that, I found it super helpful that I specifically prepared the following:
- Do company research and really ask myself questions like why I want to work for Microsoft, why I’m a good fit for Microsoft, etc.
- Expand on my passion for technology and why I’m interested in having a career in tech.
Final Technical Interviews
About a month after my phone screen, a recruiter finally reached out to me that I had advanced to the final round, but they were having trouble finding enough interviewers to schedule my interview, which eventually happened in December right before exams season.
I completed my final interviews virtually through Teams. There were two 45-minute-long sessions with full-time employees at Microsoft. For the Explore program, it can be 2 product interviews, 2 technical interviews, or a mix of both. I personally had a mix of both—started off with a technical coding question followed by a product interview.
For technical coding preparations, I recommend starting with Cracking the Coding Interview for first-year students and/or anyone without high confidence about basic data structures and algorithms. This book does a decent job of introducing relevant concepts for building a foundation. Once I felt more comfortable and familiar, I moved on to solving problems with Leetcode and Hackerrank. My top two tips for Leetcode beginners are to not spam the RUN button and to talk through your thought process the whole time. Having mock interviews with another person is also really helpful since talking while coding may take some practice to get used to.
It was definitely a lot of trying to juggle Leetcode, academics, extracurriculars, and everything else going on in my first semester of university, so I definitely did not do a great job at consistently doing practice problems. If you feel stressed out or burnt out, it’s always okay to step away from Leetcode and take a break from interview prep.
I was nowhere near perfect during my interviews so don’t be too stressed about it! I got stuck at some point in both of my interviews, but I communicated my thought process to my interviewers and asked for guidance which eventually turned out to not harm my performance evaluation. I received the offer around 3 weeks later after the Christmas/New Year holiday season ended.
Experience
Getting to Redmond
As a Canadian, I needed work authorization for this internship that’s based in Redmond, Washington. Getting a J-1 visa was probably the most frustrating and confusing part of the process. Microsoft does have partners that guide you through the visa sponsorship process, but be prepared to submit a lot of paperwork and try to be as efficient as you can.
Thankfully, it got a lot better when I did it for the second time this past summer, so you will become much more familiar with it after your first time! On top of the legal process, relocating to an entirely new area for the first time was slightly daunting for my 18-year-old self. Networking becomes really helpful here! I connected with former and/or incoming interns via LinkedIn and Discord and got more guidance and support that way.
#MicrosoftIntern Time
Microsoft cares a lot about their internship program, and typically interns get to work on a customer-facing project (may vary depending on the organization and specific team). For the Explore program, you are paired up with one or two other Explore interns to form an Explore pod. Throughout the summer, you will work with your pod on your intern project under the supervision of one or two mentors and a manager.
Explore was my first university-level internship, so it was extra nice to have not only mentorship but also a team to work through challenges with. I ended up on Azure App Services and worked specifically with the Static Web Apps team on a full-stack project to introduce a free trial experience. It was super eye-opening and challenging to touch a huge codebase in my first year and continuously get exposed to unfamiliar technologies on a daily basis.
To be completely transparent, I felt stressed out from the overwhelming information dumps for at least a week, but getting comfortable with asking for help empowered me. My advice for anyone entering Explore as a first-year student is to be humble, embrace what you don’t know (which is probably almost everything), do some independent explorations, and ask specific questions whenever you get stuck and/or confused. Repeated iterations of this cycle helped me build understanding, confidence, and also relationships with engineers on my team.
There were a lot of intern-only events held on the Microsoft campus! On top of that, interns are welcome to participate in full-time employee events as well. I got to engage in conversations with executives of my organization, have fun at various team morale events, and meet a lot of people (both interns and full-time employees), many of whom I’m still in touch with even today.
The End
The Explore program offered me the opportunity to have a summer filled with fun and growth! It was truly a transformative experience that I would recommend to anyone interested and/or curious about the tech industry. In fact, I loved my time at Microsoft so much that I eventually signed a return offer as a Software Engineer Intern for the subsequent summer.
Some of my favourite/biggest takeaways:
- When and how to ask questions
- Project scoping and managing timelines
- Working within large codebases
- Pick up new skills and technologies fast
- Gain career insights from conversations and connections
- Teamwork and communication
Feel free to reach out over LinkedIn if you have lingering questions and/or want to chat about anything related to this experience! Best of luck with everything and happy recruiting :)