Hey there! I’m Rue. In the summer after my second year, I worked at Microsoft as an Explore intern. I was on the Bing ads team in the Seattle headquarters for 12 weeks. My internship experience was a bit unique compared to other explore interns as I did 6 weeks of Product Management, 4 weeks of Data Science and 2 weeks of Software Engineering.
Pre- application process:
I heard of the program in my first year and applied, only to be rejected a couple f weeks later. I looked up other Explore interns on LinkedIn, looked through their experiences before this internship to understand what I was missing and worked on ways to gain those experiences.
Resume advice:
Most companies, if not all, look for 5 key sections on your resume: Education, Work experience, Projects, Extracurriculars and Skills.
- Education: A computer science or related, i.e., Cog Sci, Math, etc, degree. You can highlight your CS classes if you’d like to. Add in any scholarships or awards you’ve won.
- Work experience: This can be any work experience when you’re in 1st/2nd years and then gets tailored as you intern. I applied with language tutoring and event planning experiences my first time. For the second time, I had a tech consulting internship and a UX design internship.
- Projects: This could be coursework or personal projects. If it’s a course project, it’s best practice to label it as such. I had my CSC148 and CSC207 projects.
- Extracurriculars: Any on/off campus involvement or volunteering works here. I was a first-year rep at the Women in CS club at UofT. I’d highly encourage placing leadership experience here!
- Skills: Highlight any technical skills you have like programming languages and frameworks, and design experience with Figma/Canva. I’d recommend not placing soft skills here as they don’t add much to the resume and are better shown through your LinkedIn or website. The idea behind the skills section is to give recruiters a summary of the skills they can see as they read through your experiences.
Resume prep:
Follow popular templates like Jake’s template or any other template you like. My resume is a modification of Jake’s template with the technical skills right after education and an added Honors section. I’d highly recommend using an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) friendly template and always submitting PDFs. There is a lot of chatter about the ATS online but don’t be alarmed by it. It’s a resume parser that makes it easier for a recruiter to read through applicants and find the skills they are looking for.
Most recruiters have to read through 1000s of resumes and spend a couple of minutes reading them. You want to make their life easier, so following popular templates, bolding technologies used or key achievements is always the way to go. Your resume is your 10-second elevator pitch, it tells them who you are and why they should hire you, so make sure you’re proud of it.
Google’s XYZ method
Structure the bullet points in your resume with this format: “accomplished X as measured by Y by doing Z”. This sounds complicated but let’s break it down:
- accomplished X: state the result
- as measured by Y: create a metric (a fancy way of saying number) to quantify your work or the impact of your work if you can.
- by doing Z: state what work you did
For example: Minimize time consumed by 10% by standardizing product delivery & designing an automation system in software.
This is an actual line in my resume by the way! Writing like this takes a lot of practice and multiple iterations. I’d recommend starting by writing your responsibilities and what you did, from there you can look up action words and rewrite your resume. Here’s a Youtube video by Google recruiters that helped me a lot when I first wrote my resume.
Before you apply, I’d highly recommend getting your resume reviewed! Post it on the CS Discord server, ask upper years over LinkedIn or use this as your intro with a recruiter at a career fair! It can be embarrassing at first but putting yourself out there will ensure your resume shows your best self.
Make a LinkedIn and hyperlink it on your resume! Also, create a GitHub profile and if you have one, add any technical projects you’ve made. If you don’t have any technical projects, that’s okay too! You could post your leetcode solutions or course notes. These showcase your technical skills too. Pro tip: always make sure you spell out any links in case a recruiter prints out your resume.
Application process:
I applied online in early August around a week after applications had opened. Programs like Explore go through applications on a rolling basis, so applying early is your best bet.
Phone Interview
I heard back for a phone interview in August and completed it within 2 weeks of getting the interview invite. Again, when companies invite you to interview, ensure you pick an early date, ideally no later than a week from the invite date. The later you interview, the harder your chances of making it to the next rounds.
For interview prep, I used Glassdoor to compile a list of questions that other folks had been asked and practiced answers for them.
STARR format
All my questions were structured in the STARR format:
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Situation: setting up the context. For example, if you’re talking about a class, mention the class and what type of assignment it is, i.e., group or solo
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Task: mention the problem you’re going to solve
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Action: the actions you took! Teamwork is amazing and you can add 1/2 sentences about it but focus on your actions. Remember to use ‘I’ when talking about yourself. Most folks tend to use ‘we’ in group project situations, so be mindful of that
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Result: the result of your actions and the project/task
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Reflection (this is an extra thing I like to add and is optional!): what you learnt from the experience
I also practiced my elevator pitch, STARR answers for my work experience and the very popular - “Why Microsoft/Why explore?” question. I’d highly recommend reading up on a company’s mission/culture, a couple of their blog posts and products. You want to focus on understanding the company’s culture and how it relates to you.
STARR example
Now if it’s your first time interviewing all this information can be very overwhelming so I’m gonna add an example:
Interview Question: Describe a time you had to learn a new technology for a project.
Answer:
- S: In my previous internship as a Web Developer at X startup, a financial education and empowerment platform,
- T: I had to learn React in 2 weeks as that was the tech stack.
- A: I knew the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript and built a simple web dev project prior. To learn React, I created a study plan and started building a project with the basics of React. Once I could understand the logic and syntax, I read through the company code base. Then I built the component I had been assigned and sent it to my manager for a review. He reviewed it, suggested some edits and shipped the feature.
- R: The component was reusable and ran on all 4 pages of the website.
- R: Creating a plan and asking for feedback helped me learn React quickly.
Final round:
I heard back in November that I had been selected for a final round and set my date for early December. Since I had prepped all my behavioural for the phone interview, I just reviewed that and focused on the technical aspect. Explore final rounds typically contain 1 product interview and 1 technical interview.
I’d highly recommend reading up on what Product Management is if you’ve never heard of it. Cracking the Code and Cracking the PM Interview are two very popular books that help if you’ve never done this before! I had gone through Meta’s Above and Beyond Computer Science (ABCS) program, so I only focused on Microsoft-tagged leetcode easy questions.
CSC148/CSC110 does a great job of introducing you to the basics of Data structures and algorithms. Ensuring you understand the concepts and can confidently do any prep/PCRS assigned in the class should be your first priority. Once you’ve mastered that, you can move on to Cracking the Coding interview to understand how technical interviews work. Lastly, you can practice on Leetcode!
This order is super important as Leetcode can be hard to start with if you do not have good fundamentals. Also, technical interviews are conducted to see your problem-solving and communication skills. Just solving the question is not enough, you need to communicate your thought process. Watching mock interviews on YouTube and doing them with your friends is very helpful!
Here’s my general structure for these:
- Understand the question and explain it back to the interviewer in your own words
- Come up with the algorithm and discuss it. Ask your interviewer if this algorithm is okay.
- Once they say yes, start coding and explain what each line is doing as you write it
- Wrap up with the time and space complexity.
For the product interview, treat it as creating a project with your interviewer and explain as much of your thoughts as you can. This is awkward at first, but practising with friends or a stuffed animal helps!
In my technical interviews, I didn’t know what space complexity was and openly told my interviewer that. They explained it to me and helped me calculate it. Remember your interviewer is there to help you and check how coachable you are! They have been on the other side of the table and want you to succeed.
Lastly, this might sound absolutely terrifying but if you’re overwhelmed and need a moment in your interview to pause and breathe, just tell them. They’ll 100% be okay with giving you a minute to pause. I openly told my interviewer that I needed a minute to process and just sat in silence on the call.
I got my offer just before they closed for Christmas!
Experience
Offer signing and pre-internship
Your offer letter details a lot of information about the company, the pay and overall responsibilities. There is also a bunch of hiring paperwork to read and sign so be prepared for that.
I had to apply for a J1 visa to work in Redmond. They support you a lot through this process and have a dedicated team working with you. If you’re not a Canadian citizen, you’ll also need to give a Visa interview at the US consulate. Microsoft sets aside a certain amount of money to help you fund all of this!
In terms of relocation, I chose to let them handle the whole process of booking flights and providing accommodations. However, this meant that I didn’t have my ticket information until 2 days before I flew out! I’d still pick this option as relocating during Winter term finals to a new country just for the summer is a lot of work and the company handling it is less stressful.
While there is a lot of work involved, meeting other interns through LinkedIn and Discord helps a lot! Also reaching out to former interns for advice is very useful.
Internship experience
I worked on the Bing ads team and was responsible for globalizing German auto insurance ads. I did a lot of German market research, wrote out technical specifications and ran data mining scripts to get search queries. Typically Explore interns are paired with other interns and are called Pods. Every pod gets assigned a project with a Software Development mentor and a Product Management mentor.
My experience was different, while I had a pod, we were assigned individual projects. Learning about a new industry - Ads and how things work in a large corporation was intense and amazing at the same time. I got to sit in on meetings with folks who have been doing this for over 12 years, suggest ideas and test them out.
Outside of work, Microsoft does an amazing job of creating intern events and activities. Every week there was something you could do! My favourite was a weekend-long scavenger hunt across the Seattle area, where interns formed teams of 4 and drove around solving clues. One of the Microsoft building basements had been converted to a crime scene with actual crime scene tap and white chalk outlines!
Overall, I learnt a lot and met some truly amazing people, including Helen (the author of the first-year version of this article). I highly recommend this program as it is a very gentle introduction to the world of technology and everyone on your team will help you succeed. I still follow some advice my Microsoft manager gave me to this day!
I want to close this out by stating that everyone has felt imposter syndrome during the recruiting process. It’s a daunting and draining process filled with uncertainty. Everyone’s path is unique and this is truly embodied by the interns I met at Microsoft. All of us came from different degrees, universities and experiences. There’s a huge involvement of luck and being at the right place at the right time. I got rejected my first time but got accepted my second. Just keep trying and apply is my main piece of advice!
Feel free to reach out over LinkedIn if you have questions or would like a resume review!