Jay is a fourth-year student in the computer science department. He completed his internship in Microsoft and was able to obtain a Pre-Placement Offer.
Selection Procedure:-
Microsoft, being one of the largest tech companies in the world, needs no introduction. It comes on the very first day of the internship season. Jay went through two screening tests and three interviews. The first test was based upon elementary machine learning concepts and the second was based on algorithms. All the interviews were technical and the questions asked were related to machine learning, his projects and the second year internship that he did at BOSCH, Banglore. In the end, he was amongst one of the two students in the institute who qualified for this internship.
First Day Feels:
In the starting days, he was a bit nervous but most of that was his excitement, although he admitted that working from home scaled down these feelings a little bit. On the very first day, he went through an orientation and was introduced to what the company stands for and their values. He felt very elated after entering this world and was very impressed in general by the people working for the company and found them very friendly and approachable.
The Intern Experience:
Initially, he had to select his research problem (they were around 30-40,) and a mentor was assigned to his research group. His work was in machine learning and Natural Language Processing; specifically he needed to create a topic wise segmentation model on Audio instances (mostly Metting data). Although the intern was industrial this topic was research-based, and he had to work a lot and conduct many experiments. He learned a lot of things during his internship and was able to publish a research paper in an internal conference.
The challenges of working remotely:
As Jay was doing a corporate intern, almost every day he had to attend a meeting with his teammates and mentor and give daily updates of the daily work that he has done. He mentions that there is a huge difference in team-bonding while working remotely and being there in person. He mentions that working remotely is more challenging as more work is involved and it can be very tiring and uninspiring. Every day you are spending most of your time in front of a laptop on the same spot and there is no room for a change of scene as such, therefore it gets very difficult to keep yourself motivated.
Takeaways:
The overall intern experience for Jay was very good and he learned a lot of things. Apart from technical skills, he mentions adaptability as one of the skills that he found useful in his time there as he had to use a lot of software that he never used before. He also learned the importance of presentation, as he was shaken by how much people there cared about their presentations and how much work they put in it. He stands amazed by the difference an internship can make.