12 weeks of internship went by so fast. It’s magical that I’m already sitting on the chair in my place at Champaign, and typing this blog on my 27-inch screen. It’s so nice using this huge screen again.
The internship experience was nice, and I learned a lot from my mentor and manager. On the last day of my internship, I sent a farewell letter to wrap it up, and I mentioned three important things I’ve learned from them:
Being serious about quality
I feel like this is the most important mindset to have as a programmer. Quality can mean well-structured code, high test coverage, clear documentation and comments, etc. My intern project was mainly developing a new tool; although building the tool wasn’t difficult, the trickiest part was designing good code structure and writing maintainable code. I was always thinking about this when I wrote each line of code and it took me a lot of time.
Staying accountable
When people make mistakes, we tend to avoid responsibility and pretend nothing happened. However, I found out that everyone is accountable here. If anyone messes up some code, they admit it, they fix it, and don’t shift blame. I feel that I haven’t done this very well in my whole life, but I’ve started to believe I’m able to do it.
Being trustworthy
My manager and mentor always said things clear when I asked questions. They never tried to hide things. Even my skip-3 managers, who manage the whole Core OS group, talked in the same way during all-hands meetings. They always started with “I will share as much as I know”, setting the tone that everyone has same amount of information. In my meetings with my manager, I practiced telling my real feelings, and I’ve learned how to express my feelings and thoughts in a more open and comfortable way.
A few months ago I watched a video about the concept “craft”, which means that the most precious skills you can only learn from people instead of book or other media. It was not until this internship that I realized how important learning from people is. In the world of computer science, I always think I can learn anything on the internet, but actually the essence is in people’s mind.
Having a role model is important. It helps young generation like me learn what good traits are. Just like the importance of Mom and Dad in a family. Through reflection, my sense of being lost may be related to my distance from my Dad, which means that I don’t have a man role model in my life. Now I think my manager and mentor can be my role models.
Honestly I feel that what I learned the most from this internship is simply how to become a better human. I feel a bit of shame that it took me until now to truly understand this, but I’m also grateful that I finally do.
Lastly, I want to thank Ken, my senior in college, who also interned at Microsoft and shared lots of tips that helped me make good use of Microsoft’s resources.