Each year, Microsoft brings hundreds of high school and college students to the Redmond and Mountain View campuses for internship opportunities. Internships are paid and other benefits are provided – you can get more details at the Microsoft college site. Interns don’t spend their time running errands or getting coffee – they work on real projects, many of which become shipping features in Microsoft products. At the end of a successful internship, students are either invited back for another internship (if not graduating within the next school year) or offered a full-time position.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to return to my alma mater, Whitworth University, to do on-campus interviews for our summer internship program and for some of our full-time openings as well. This is the third or fourth year in a row I’ve done this, and each year I’m increasingly impressed by the level of candidates Whitworth fields.

Whitworth is not known as a powerhouse university for computer science and engineering degrees – that is, it doesn’t get put on the same plane as MIT, Waterloo, the UW or universities like those. When  I graduated mumble mumble number of years ago, the CS department was one professor, about 5 students, and a few desk-sized machines housed in the basement of the library. A very small area of the basement of the library. These days there are closer to 40 students in the CS department, with more in math and engineering disciplines. A huge new science building is being built, with plans to remake the old science center into a premier math and CS center once the new building is complete.

Still, Whitworth is a tiny university compared to the universities where Microsoft usually does active recruiting. Despite having a large and robust internship program, our on-campus recruiting has been greatly scaled back in recent years, with only a fraction of the universities we used to visit getting the kind of attention that Whitworth is getting. Usually, campuses like Whitworth would simply be covered by regional job fairs. So why is Whitworth special?

Because I’m an alum, I believe in the power of a liberal arts education, and I put my money and my mouth to work to make it happen.

A few years ago, my team at Microsoft had ended up without an intern for the summer despite seeing a few candidates. A few had okay coding skills. We could have helped them to improve those skills. But not a single one seemed to be able to reason their way out of the proverbial wet paper bag. Thinking was not happening. Reasoning was weak. Problem solving? Well, they might be able to solve a coding problem one way, but change it up a bit and they were completely lost. And testing their own code? Or testing problems we gave them? Not happening. This was during the worst of the shortage of CS candidates overall, and the test candidate pool was especially small. While this particular year was the tipping point, it wasn't the first year, nor was it the last where my colleagues and I saw a small, poorly prepared pool of test developement candidates.

One of the issues, I decided, was that not a one of these students had taken a test engineering course. There are only a handful of CS programs in the US and maybe two in Canada that have such a course. More make mention of testing as part of a generic “software engineering” course where testing might get a week or two of attention. So I started talking to some folks. And plotting. None of us thought we could get any traction at one of the big universities. The wheels turn even more slowly there than they do at Microsoft these days. And for me, there was also the niggling realization that the big universities where we do most of our hiring from don’t teach critical thinking. That’s something that usually happens better and more often at the small liberal arts colleges. Also, many of the best candidates for full-time positions that I’ve hired during my career at Microsoft came not from big CS departments, but from smaller liberal arts college backgrounds where they got CS degrees in addition to a fundamental education that taught them to think critically.

Hey wait, *I* went to a small liberal arts college. And I’d been hearing good things about the CS department at that particular small liberal arts college. So I pinged the university president, the alumni director, and a friend in the campaign department who delights in taking my money every year and asked who to talk to. I didn’t know anyone in the CS department any more. They in turn pointed me to Pete Tucker, Susan Mabry, and Kent Jones, the full-time faculty for the Whitworth CS department. All of them were interested in the idea I had to teach a semester-long course in test engineering. Pete, it turned out, was an ex-Softie who had had roles both in test engineering and development so understood some of the problems I explained we were seeing. Susan and Kent both had industry backgrounds so were also aware of the types of problems I described, and were both firm believers in not only teaching their students those critical thinking skills, but also in prepping students for the real world after college.

The more I heard about what they were doing, the more I liked the program. Many of their classes pair up with businesses and other groups in the community to do real projects and apply the theoretical stuff they learn in class. They do some in-class projects too, but it’s really these community projects that drive home a lot of what they are learning. It forces them to do some of that critical thinking and also forces them to think and act professionally throughout their learning. Before I could really get more than about two sentences out about how great a test class would be, Pete had jumped on the idea, put together a prospectus, gotten it approved out of cycle (the students had already preregistered for the next term when I approached them with the idea), put together a syllabus, and had convinced a full class of students to change their schedules so they could add this new test class. I think I understand why he won the Most Innovative Professor Award that year. All I had to do was promise to come back the next year and interview the students who passed the course. Oh, yeah, and reroute a small bit of my annual gift to the CS department to cover the fee for Pete teaching an extra course the next term.

This year so far, at least 2 Whitworth students will be joining Microsoft as interns. There are still a few “in the pipeline” so to speak, who will be evaluated for offers over the next few weeks. I’d love to see another two or three. Each year I’ve screened between 12 and 16 students. They aren’t all stellar, but in general they are noticeably above the average level of interns I have interviewed in any given year. The thing that most strikes me is that in each group, there are always two sophomores who stand out – they get it, they are committed, and they are scary smart and scary good at coding and problem solving. Sometimes there is a scary, scary smart freshman. And always, always, the one I need to be most on my toes to deal with is the last interview of the day, when inevitably my brain feels like it’s become gelatinous goo leaking from my ears and I’m completely exhausted.

The testing course has become a regular course in the curriculum rotation at Whitworth. Pete Tucker is on sabbatical this term, doing research to write a book for the course after deciding that something is missing from the few textbooks currently available on the subject. 

Nothing beats the feeling I had last week when I saw an email from a Whitworth grad, a guy I interviewed last year, who is now working on a team in our Mountain View offices as a full-time developer. I don’t even mind that he went over to the “dark side” and bypassed test development for development.

Oh, those five or so students who were in the CS department when I was at Whitworth? I wasn’t one of them. I graduated with a double major in French and English/Creative Writing. My profs shake their heads when they try to figure out how I’ve spent almost 20 years now in computer engineering roles. So do I some days.