Today is my last day at Microsoft. It’s hard to use one word to describe the whole internship experience at Mobile and Embedded Device Content Publishing team, but in general it’s a fantastic, super-exciting experience.

Interns have great benefits here at Microsoft. Not only the competitive salary, free soda, free membership at the local fitness center, etc, but also training and networking opportunities. During the summer, I did real projects which will be seen by customers; I learned the development, documentation, and bug reporting process by applying them in my real work; I was invited to team meetings, so that I know what others are going on in the team and learn how my manager hosts meetings and keeps meetings effective.

Also, the Microsoft corporate training resource is completely available to interns. Through internal learning system, I took more than 40 hours’ classes online or in person. I also attended the internal Engineering Excellence and Trustworthy Computing conference.  I bet I learned a lot more during these three months here at Microsoft than during the whole previous academic year at school.

 I’ve also been invited to a lot of intern social events. There I was able to meet other interns, full-time employees, and even executives. I guess interns like us meet VPs and other executives more often than anybody else in our team. And we were invited to Bill Gates’ house; we met Steve Ballmer in our own Intern Product Fair.

Then let me talk something about people in our group, or in the company.

People here are so kind and nice. All people I met during this internship, no matter in our team or other teams, are helpful and self-motivate. When I just started, I never used C++ to write a Windows application before, but I need to use it to do my project.  I had a lot of questions, but luckily the people around me are so kind to help me with every single question I have, until I solved them.

If you will say that they helped me because they are in the same team, I will say that the person who reviewed my code is from another team and he never known who I am. He reviewed my thousands of lines of code, reviewed my nine-page documentation, and sent me a detailed report on the issues.  This is not his job; he’s not required or paid to help me. But people here are just that nice. You can drop by anybody at their door and ask for help and they will do it.

Managers are nice too. They are more like “mentors” than “managers.” Whenever I have any trouble, my manager can think of a way to help me get rid of the trouble. It isn’t necessarily to be project related. In my 1:1 meeting with my manager every week, we talked about projects, life, and anything interesting. He (or his personality) is always motivating me to be better not only for working, but also as a person.

We also have two assigned coaches. They are our day-to-day contact points. Both of them helped us a lot, with either technical or coordinating problems. They spent a lot of time with us, and help us.

And we’ve got an Intern Program Facilitator. She’s so nice too. She helped me even before my internship starts, with technical guidance. When the internship actually started, she helped a lot with coordination. The whole process can’t be this smooth without her.

In addition, I have a great peer intern here (Jason Kim) who shares the office with me. He also helped with ideas when I got stuck. It’s been great working with him.

With all the resources I have and all people’s help, I completed two Windows Mobile starter kit projects during the summer. I appreciate all their help. It’s impossible to complete the projects without them. Mobile and Embedded Devices Content Publishing team rocks! Windows Mobile team rocks! Microsoft rocks!

Overall, this is a great internship experience, and it’s my best working experience ever. I tried to put my best efforts to my work. I hope they will meet customer expectations and I hope they are valuable. I went to our Company Meeting yesterday, and I want to use the beginning of Steve Ballmer’s keynote to end this post:

“I love this company.”