Office Standard Summer Interns Mike Rodgers

Next up in our series of posts by PowerPoint's summer interns is Software Development Engineer Mike Rodgers. Hi there, I;m Mike Rodgers, and I;m mid-way through my twelve-week internship as a Software Development Engineer (or Dev for short) with the PowerPoint team. I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and I;ve spent the last four years out in California, studying Computer Science at Stanford University. I;m enrolled in a “Co-terminal” program, meaning that I;ll graduate with both a Bachelor;s and a Master;s in CS after five to six years total. My interview process was a bit simpler than Jesse;s and Nirav;s because I was already in the Bay Area. Microsoft paid for me to rent a car,Office 2007 Ultimate Key, I drove out to the campus, and interviewed with four or five of the developers. Something that really impressed me about the team was that they were quite organized and didn;t mess about for very long in making their decision. They had all the info they were going to get, and they must have sat down, talked about it, and made a decision as soon as I left, because I got a call with the offer before I made it back to my dorm. I;ve been very pleased with my internship on the PowerPoint team. Microsoft makes very little distinction between interns and full-time employees. For the time that we;re here, we have the same privileges, security access, etc. as everybody else. And the other employees treat us just the same. The internship program also puts a lot of emphasis on the personal growth of the interns – you make a contribution to the company, but the company also makes a pretty big contribution to your development as a professional. When I was considering my different options for the summer, what really made the  decision for me was everyone;s assurances that,Office 2010 Professional Key, if I worked at Microsoft, I;d get to work on a “real” project. They were telling the truth. I;ve had a variety of prior internships, and in almost all of them, I frequently felt that I was working as a code monkey on miscellaneous,Office Standard, unrelated odds and ends—doing the grunt-work no one else wanted to do. Or,Office 2007 Activation, even worse, I felt like I was working on something that the team would kind of like to have at some point in the future but that may or may not ever get used. I;ve even had my boss seem flustered that she had to come up with something new for me to do because I had completed an assignment faster than she had anticipated. In my internship at Microsoft on the PowerPoint team, I was given a real problem of my own, and I;m writing code that is interesting, important,Windows 7 Ultimate Product Key, and that will ship with the next version of PowerPoint. It;s pretty exciting that millions of people will be using something I worked on. Working at the SVC campus does mean there are fewer interns around, but it;s certainly got its perks. As Jesse said, the weather is unbeatable. (I actually commute by bike five days a week.) Also, Silicon Valley is an exciting place to be for techie people of a college age. A couple weeks ago, a bunch of the MS SVC Interns took on the Google Interns in a game of laser-tag. Someone needs to show them they don;t hold dominion in The Valley…