Microsoft Student Partners

Background

Note: This post relates to Microsoft Internships for the Software Desgin Engineer (SDE) and the Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) positions. It is also aimed at Australian students but might also be helpful to anyone applying for a job at Microsoft.

Microsoft offers US winter (AU summer) internships to Australian students currently completing university each year for the 3 months Dec – Feb. The internships are opportunities to work with a real Microsoft development team in Redmond. They are paid positions, including flights to the States. The process generally begins around the middle of the year, with offers going out around September. For this year, 2008, the offers have just been made.

Preparation

Preparation is the key to getting an offer. You proceed through a variety of interviews on varying technical content. Here is how I prepared.

- Subscribe to Channel 8 and do a search on the archives for internships, interns, jobs and interviews. Channel 8 is a MSDN blog with a huge amount of quality content for students. Update: They now have a Careers section which is awesome!

- Subscribe to the Microsoft Jobs Blog. Also read through the archives. This blog has a huge numbers of tips, reader questions, sample interview questions and other content to help you get your offer.

- Study all the content at MIS Laboratory. This page has a good number of links to content that help, especially with behavioral interview style questions. It goes through the STAR technique and other techniques on how to answer questions such as “How do you move mount Fuji?”

- Become a fan to the Microsoft Careers Facebook Page and ask questions to the HR teams and checkout information posted there.

- Google/Bing for interview questions. I spent a huge amount of time just putting in queries that relate to questions. You can learn a lot from the experiences of others, and often people will have put up solutions to the problems they received.

- Practice solving problems. Actually do them. I went back over my previous labs from units at university that I knew would help me, such as writing simple string functions. Also, I competed in the ACM Programming Competition which was excellent preparation for writing code to interesting problems.

- Practice interview questions. Actually do them. You can find lists of interview questions online. Youtube has a lot of interview videos. But you need to focus on the doing and not just the reading.

- I found some very helpful practice is to re-write basically library functions. One way to do this is look at the basic C functions such as strstr, strtok, etc and re-write their functionality in another language, such as C# or Java. Look at basic string manipulation, number calculation functions, etc. Translating the functionality heaps you understand it, and is especially helpful if you choose to use another language in the interview.

- Apply for other Internships. As I personally have not a lot of time, I only applied for one other. A Google Internship position in Sydney. Not only does this force you to prepare, but it also help introduce you to some of the processes that these companies use.

- Ask for help. Try to find someone who has already been through the process (successful or not). You can normally find someone by asking your local Microsoft Student Partner.

- Learn about the products and determine what you’d like to work on. Generally interviewers want to see specific interest rather than, “I’m happy to do anything.” It shows you are focused and know what you want. So research the products.

- Read the book. How to move Mount Fuji.

- Brush up on your maths. Particularly discrete maths and basic binary maths.

Some more help preparation links (thanks Google )

- http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html
- http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/five-essential-phone-screen-questions
- http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/what-you-need-to-know

Process

Getting an internship offer is a multi-stage process. Here is how it worked this year. It may change, but it will probably follow a similar format.

1. Respond to the advertisement for the internship when it comes out around mid year. It is normally posted on http://blogs.msdn.com/msozacademic/ and we’ll most likely post it on here too.

2. You will generally start off by sending your Resume by E-mail to the Australian recruiters in Redmond.

3. First lot of questions come through by E-mail. You basically fill out all the questions and send them back. The questions primarily relate to your current studies and previous experience in computing.

4. The next stage is a phone interview. It was done by HR recruiters from Kelly Services. It went around 30 mins long and tests you on very basic knowledge and problem solving skills. Some sample questions are:
- What is a stack/queue? How do you test a stack/queue? 
- Explain the differences in memory management between C#/Java with C/C++.
- Explain the differences between Language A and Language B.
- The 3 light switch problem
- Problem solving a slow elevator in a tall building (process question) 

5. If you pass the phone interview stage the next step was to attend technical interviews at the Microsoft office in Melbourne (Freshwater Place). Melbourne was the place for everyone I personally know (even Sydney guys) this time around, however some people have been interviewed in Sydney as well in the past. For us Perth guys, Microsoft flew us, all expenses paid to Melbourne for the interviews, and put us up in a nice hotel for the night. The technical interview stage comprised of 3x 30 min interviews. Two were technical, and one was HR. For each of the technical interviews you had to solve a particular problem in whatever language you wanted.

Result

The recruiting team did an awesome job, and had our results out to us within a week. It’s either a good E-mail or a not so good one.

Other Tips and Hints

- The interviewers are not trying to trick you. So just step through the problem and approach it using the processes you have learnt.
- Believe in yourself. It’s not just about smarts. Some smarter people missed out while others have got in.
- Prepare as if it is a real full-time, permanent job. That is, do your very best.

Luke
MSP at UWA, Ex-Microsoft Intern