Inside a Software engineer internship at Microsoft

The web is full of resources related to internship interview preparations for Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and other big tech companies (just to name a few), but when I have accepted the offer for my summer Software Engineer internship at Microsoft, I was not able to find useful information about the onboarding process timeframes and general structure of the internship, in terms of expectations, contributions and approach to the team in big corporations.

In this article, I will summarize the onboarding process and core events that have to characterize my internship, reflecting also on the growth given by this experience.

Offer acceptance

Once have accepted the offer for an internship, is highly recommended to ask the HR contact when the next step would possibly happen, and what to expect in the following steps.

Is important to keep in mind that the whole HR team gives priority according to the chronological order of the start dates. This means that in case of offer acceptance during the winter, for the summer internship of the next year, before and after the Christmas breaks, the priority will be given to all the sprint interns (who will start so before you).

Is important to understand that in big corporates, multiple people even from different departments could work at the same time for your onboarding experience, and this is why is normal to wait weeks or months between each stage. Below, you will find my personal timeline of key events that occurred between the interview process and day 0.

• November 2020: interview
• December 2020: offer discussion
• March 2021: contract presentation
• June 2021: Met my manager
• June 2021: hardware or general asset received (the presence of hardware or any other asset could depend on different factors, for example, role, job location, type of work (remote or office), and benefits.
• July 2021: Internship kick-off.

Introduction to the mentor

Once started your internship at Microsoft, you will get introduced to your mentor, a key figure for your success. The mentor will give you context about company policies, the team, the roles of each team member, and initiate you to the initial training and what is going be the project you are going to work on.