Microsoft Engage to SWE internship at Microsoft

Each year, over 25–30k students apply for the Microsoft engage program and only 500–700 students get selected for the mentorship. I was one of the lucky candidates to get this amazing opportunity, and I sought to make the most out of it and in the end I received an SWE 2022 summer internship offer at Microsoft ❤. And I'm going to share my journey with you through this article.

Microsoft engage is a mentorship program conducted by Microsoft in the month of June-July, and opens for only 2nd-year students, application opens towards the end of 2nd year (this timeline may vary with college), and students from some specific colleges are selected. People with the following qualifications are allowed to apply to this program:

• Graduation year: 2nd
• CGPA: 7 and above.
• Course: B.Tech/B.E/Dual Degree
• Branch: Any
• No pending backlogs
• Strong CS Fundamentals and Coding principles required

One can find all the details of the application at their career portal. After 2–3 weeks of initial shortlisting through resumes, the shortlisted people received an invite for a test link. Create an amazing resume to pass this round and focus on your CGPA starting from the first year of your college & create good projects and practice problem-solving. The quiz test consists of 15–20 questions in 45 min. And the following topics are important: 

• Data structures and Algorithms
• Operating system
• Database Management System
• Java Programming
• Problem solving - with 4–5 coding questions and the rest were reasoning-based & MCQ questions.

After 1 week we received the qualification mail and I qualified to participate in Engage🎉

I was very excited to be mentored by mentors from Microsoft and attend amazing AMA sessions.
The theme for our year was Agile Development where we were supposed to create a Video conferencing application i.e. Clone of Microsoft Teams, find more details of the task on this website.

We were allotted 2 mentors, mine was Tushar and Gulbir sir, along with a group of 6 students. And I couldn't have asked for better mentors ❤, we had 2 meetings weekly, one was a group meeting and the other was a one-on-one meeting with a mentor, to discuss the obstacles during the development phase and get insights about work at Microsoft along with a plethora of informative AMA sessions.

After 5 weeks of hard work and with the help of my mentors and friends(Dev Sharma, Aniket Singh, and Mahera), I was able to complete my project and it was very well received.

Link to my submission: https://github.com/Apurva-tech/unite
And the application: https://unite-apurva.herokuapp.com/

The evaluation of submission could either give me the opportunity to get a direct offer or an interview opportunity.
After 3–4 weeks of evaluation, some people received a direct offer for the internship and I was not one of them 😔. I decided to work hard on my DSA skills and ace the interviews whenever I receive interview slots.

And in the end, all the work did pay off and I was recommended for the Final (AA) round of the interview, i.e I had to give only the final interview. I was asked about my project in the Engage program and a 45 minutes discussion on a real-world application of DSA. The interviewer was very sweet and helped throughout the interview, it was one of the best experiences of my journey. One thing that my mentor Joshika di told me is

"The way you speak and react in interviews, is actually who you really are"

, I kept this in mind, and remained calm during the whole interview, and thought of each aspect of the questions asked.

I gave my interview on August 18 in the morning and was scared to death about the results, and to my surprise, I received the results in the afternoon, my happiness knew no bounds, it was soooo overwhelming (obviously I couldn't stop screaming 😂), I had received the internship offer 🎉🎉
I hope this article helps you in some way. Happy learning ❤