tips/tricks to get an Internship at Microsoft | The Coffeehouse

alwaysmc2
It's not stupid; It's advanced!

Microsoft is at my college for a career fair. I'm trying to make a good impression (by coming on so strong it stinks). I wore the binary Microsoft Software shirt yesterday, and I even put a Microsoft Tag on my resume. I hope the Windows Mobile guy sees that. ^_^ Now I just need to go to a Zune demo and send my business card that way. Tongue Out I hope my resume speaks for itself as well...

Any suggestions for how to stand out? Also, I'm wondering what portion of Microsoft actually reads threads in the Coffeehouse.

rhm

Wear a t-shirt that says "Yes, I know why manhole covers are round"

section31
OutOfCoffeeException

talk to littleguru, he knows Wink

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to rhm

#Sep 15th @ 9:03 AM

Eheheh... I remember during my interview one of the questions was: "An earthquake destroyed your city's local airport. You're in charge of rebuilding it. What do you do?"

Smiley

intelman

My advice to you is just dress professionally ( I would not feel comfortable in a Microsoft binary t-shirt), keep bugging them , and express loads of intrest. If they see you want it, it can't hurt. The exception would be if you seem obsessive to the point of disfunction.

My Microsoft experience has blown. The Microsoft reps are my career fair told me that there is no in house hardware design. Xbox is outsourced, Zune is outsourced, keyboard and mouse is outsourced....etc.

I find it hard to believe that there is not one hardware engineer. Although with all the Xbox 360 failtures, perhaps no one calculated that the heatsink on the 360 was not adequette. Couldn't Microsoft at least put an intern on it to investigate a proper solution?

I emailed someone at Microsoft.com/careers. I was in contact with a Microsoft "talent scout" that told me that there are no Chemical Engineers at Microsoft and I probably would not get placed.I was encouraged to submit my resume to microsoft.com/college though.

Google is so up tight about contacting them and taking interns. I really wanted to get in on

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2007/11/google-gets-gre/

Plus the economy went south, so the only companies that hire now are big oil. Not cool. I want to do more.

CreamFilling512

If you're in college and don't have much work experience yet, put personal projects you've worked on and think are cool onto your resume. Just be prepared to talk about them in interviews.

alwaysmc2
It's not stupid; It's advanced!

In reply to CreamFilling512

#Sep 15th @ 10:38 AM

I have tons of work experience and some good personal projects. http://davidmcgrath.com/résumé My problem is getting the Microsoft reps to take notice. Do they even have any say? They take some notes, but it seems that the end-all is at http://microsoft.com/college.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

Ignore what anyone from "careers" says. It's all about networking: you need to make friends, and fast, inside Microsoft, especially those at the PM level or higher as these people can easily get a placement made for you and you only. The "submit your resume" form on the careers site is probably piped directly to /dev/null.

Of course, get friendly with the MS guys who pop on to campus, but I recommend browsing blogs.msdn.com and looking for a developer's blog who is into the same interests as you, email him and strike up a friendly relationship and use that to win favour from his superiors to win a placement.

It isn't egalitarian, but it works, and shows initiative Wink

CreamFilling512

In reply to W3bbo

#Sep 15th @ 4:18 PM

I don't think thats necessary for a college internship. My freshman year in college I went to the fall job fair, talked to a MS rep for like 15 minutes about my NES emulator (which was my current personal project at the time) and other geeky stuff, had to write some 6502 assembly on the back of my resume. Then I got called in for the on-campus interview a couple days later. After answering a bunch of easy questions about C pointers on-campus, I flew out for the full MS interviews. This is how the college recruiting normally works from my understanding, internship and full-time.

1. You give your resume to school recruiter or rep at a job fair

2. You'll probably be asked to come to a short on-campus interview, might be over phone

3. If you make it through that, they'll ask you to come out to Redmond for full-day interviews

If you don't make it through the interviews you can try again the following year.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

In reply to CreamFilling512

#Sep 15th @ 4:48 PM

I guess my strategy works best for non-US locations. Microsoft doesn't really go to many campuses in the UK for intern recruitment.

dahat

In reply to W3bbo

#Sep 15th @ 4:18 PM

especially those at the PM level or higher as these people can easily get a placement made for you and you only

PM level? You realize that while the M in the title stands for Program Manager... the majority of them have no managerial authority... right? Sure, a PM Lead (or similar title) will likely have another PM or 3 under them and have some hiring influence (ie a up or down vote during the interview loop)... but still only for another PM. Devs have their own reporting/hiring chain of command, as do the testers.

Hell... you could become best friends with the Group Program Manager of a team and the best they’ll be able to do for a dev is hand your resume off to the Dev Manager and say “please take a look.”

If one is a developer and wants to make friends with those who have the best shot of getting them hired... devs are the best people to get to know or be noticed by as, be it lowly front line devs, dev leads or dev managers as they will be the most likely people who would be involved in a hiring decision.