Microsoft Summer Interns Party at Bill's - 海外工作

eWeek 專訪在Microsoft summer intern的學生

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2163541,00.asp

Microsoft Summer Interns Party at Bill's

By Deborah Perelman
July 27, 2007

What's it like to have a job where you have regular roundtable discussions
with executives and have a barbeque in the backyard of the richest man in
the world?

Is it possible to work with a company that is so eager to invest in your
ideas you feel that as big as you can dream they will back you up, and
where your only grievance is that you are having such a great time, you
almost forget that it's real work?

Just ask Nina Sundberg, who interned in the server and tools division of
the systems management group at Microsoft.

"Even though I was just there for a short period of time, I felt like I
had the opportunity to be as successful as I could be," Sundberg gushed
of her summer 2003 experience.

After a half-year stint at Dell and three years at Amazon, Sundberg knew
she was ready for something different. While completing her MBA, she
interned at Microsoft for one summer before accepting a job with the same
team for the fall. She's been there for three years since.

"I ended up with two opportunities to go to MSN [because of my Amazon
experience] and one to stay in systems management. The reason I decided
to stay in systems management was that it was emerging for Microsoft, but
it was at enough of a critical mass that we weren't just a startup. I
wanted to gain new experiences," Sundberg said.

Working in a more established startup environment proved ideal for Sundberg,
who was brimming with ideas. As a newbie, most workplaces weren't chomping
at the bit to hear her out.

"One of my favorite parts about the work I did, and do now, is Microsoft's
willingness to invest," said Sundberg. "I feel like I've come up with some
crazy ideas, but they always are willing to listen and invest in things,
some which have been successful and others that were not. I feel totally
empowered to look at something completely different, and even when some of
my suggestions fail, it's very much a 'let's go for it!' culture."

At Dell and Amazon, Sundberg felt more of a hesitancy about trying out new
ideas. "At Microsoft, I feel like anything I can come up with is something
we can go after," she said.

This 'let's go for it!' culture was not the only perk of interning at
Microsoft. Every single intern has the opportunity to attend a barbeque
at Bill Gates house over the summer, divided over three or four evenings
to ensure that it will not be too crowded for face-to-face interaction.
Furthermore, executives would often take small groups of interns out for
lunch to discuss ideas for future projects.

"We'd have lunch with various executives in groups of 20 or 30 and they
would talk to us about how they were strategizing and thinking about their
worlds," Sundberg said. "It really gave us a 'this is a single company and
we're all working together' feeling, as what we are doing makes more sense
in the context of each other. It's easy to get the sense that the vertical
where you work is the whole world."

If there is any single thing that interns at Microsoft are not doing, it's
making photocopies.

"They get to know the projects that will impact the users. They're not making
photocopies or fetching coffee," Caroline Bulmer, coordinator of Microsoft's
intern program, told eWEEK. "We give them work we'd really give an entry-level
employee out of college. There's a whole lot of technology that they can work
on."

The projects that interns work on over their 12 weeks at the company are not
pushed aside at the end of the summer, as if they were just practice rounds
for the real thing.

"We had an intern that was here for a first internship who got together with
two other interns and suggested that they create a game for our online gaming
community. All three were invited back to work on it, and the game, Aegis Wing,
launched in early May," Bulmer said.

In fact, when pressed, the only grievance a former intern could come up with
about the program was that it was almost too good. Real work, in comparison,
was almost a drag.

"We were almost too sheltered. The program is phenomenal, and I feel like my
project team did a really good job of sheltering me from the mundane, day-to-day
stuff. It was a little detached from reality. We got to eat dinner at Bill Gates
house and hang out with executives all summer," said Sundberg.

"In hindsight, I think it's good to balance that with what the grind is, because
every job has a grind."



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