Microsoft

Explore Internship (SWE & PM)

During my sophomore year summer, I was an Explore intern at Microsoft. I flew all the way to Redmond, Washington to join Team Xbox for the summer. I worked on identity in Xbox, prototyping new flows to help streamline the experience for getting users signed in and ready to engage with their content. This included increasing the number of games a user in the Xbox app on PC can be logged into simultaneously. My code will soon be sitting natively in your Windows PC.

In the 12 weeks, I honed my C++ skills and learned about creating cache systems. I wrote my first design document, became one with git, and made debugging my best friend. Overall, I learned how to be a software engineer and work in a team of software engineers, but mainly I learned to ask for help and collaborate.

Apart from my main project, I familiarized myself with Microsoft by having as many 1:1s as I could. From these meetings, I discovered a problem in Outlook's calendar, particularly when an invitee proposes a new time. Having experienced the issue myself, I interviewed others at Microsoft to validate the problem. Once validated, I created a document with a user story, outlined the problem and affected users, proposed a solution, prototyped it in Figma, and found a product manager in Outlook Calendar to pitch this to. It was well-received, and after all the testing is done, this feature will also be available in your Outlook calendar.

I also met with CVPs and Group Product Managers to understand their roles in Microsoft and Xbox, meeting Brad Smith, Phil Spencer (CEO Xbox), Sarah Bond (President Xbox), Matt Booty (President Xbox Gaming Studios), and several other influential and interesting people.

I won the Xbox intern ping pong tournament and the kickball tournament, went on hikes, tried several Asian cuisines, built Legos, experienced cloud gaming, and finished the Halo Infinite Campaign... What a great summer!

You can check out more on my LinkedIn.