Engineering student to experience working at Microsoft

The internship programme will take place during New Zealand's summer months at Microsoft's corporate headquarters in Seattle, which due to its sheer size boasts shuttle buses to transport its 30-40,000 employees between some offices. "It's going to be a completely different scale to what you see in Auckland”, says Timo. “It'll be great to experience a completely different environment, weather and culture, but technical problems are why I got into Software Engineering, so that's what I'm really looking forward to seeing – how they manage that as a huge company."

The competitive internship is open to students worldwide. The process includes an hour-long Skype interview, followed by four technical interviews on-location in Sydney. After the rigorous round of tests, Timo received a final call for an offer.

For Timo, studying Software Engineering certainly helped him approach Microsoft's rigorous tests – he considered his algorithms class particularly valuable to the first interview, though "all the courses in Engineering are really about finding your own ways to approach problems". He also considered a summer internship at Orion Health to be useful to exercising those abilities.

"That's what happened most days – trying to figure out what the bugs were. I learned a lot and they were a great group of people tackling unique problems. The company has been around for a while so to meet senior people with their incredible depth of knowledge helped me see how complicated things can get, and to realise that there's a lot I to think about in any given situation."

Those study and work experiences extended Timo's perception of what the real world of Software Engineering is like. He suggests, "a lot of us in software – and I'd say I'm one of them – we just like to code and do that right, but we don't always think about the human side as much, but if people are going to be using your product, it doesn't matter if you've made the most amazing algorithm ever. We've been doing courses in human-computer interaction, and learning about design decisions based on the human end – which is totally different to the coding – and the real challenge is moulding those together to get something that people actually like to use."

The human element is also evident in the specialisation's project-based courses that push the value of collaborating in teams. "You how you can't do nearly as much on your own as you can in a team. Nobody works in isolation in industry. Software also has a really tight-knit cohort unlike in some other faculties, so you get the opportunity to know the people in your classes really well."

While he currently has little information on what his experience would fully entail, he is open to possibilities, adding that there is no specific product that would not constitute an enriching experience. "There's a lot of stuff going on with AI. Microsoft's involvement with the HoloLens is really cool – the computer vision and Augmented Reality, and people wearing them just feels like the future. Something like that would be awesome, but I think the great thing about being in a place like Microsoft is that you'd know people are going to use your software, and any change you make can affect thousands, if not millions out there."

Timo will return to New Zealand to complete Part IV of his BE(Hons) after the internship.