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My final internship reflection

I have been a software engineering intern in the Content Search and Insights team in the One Drive and SharePoint organization at Microsoft. My internship project was adding the first Viva Topic card to Microsoft Teams Android and iOS clients. This was both exciting and challenging. It was exciting to work on the first version of a feature that will be added to Microsoft Teams but also challenging because no other engineer on my team had worked with mobile application development before. Although this was my third internship at Microsoft, it was going to be the first time I worked individually on an entire project. In the past, I worked in groups of three to five interns with Product Management and Software engineering mentors. This internship was different, I had one Engineering mentor who had worked on the web version of the feature I was adding in Teams mobile, a product manager to occasionally consult about parts of my project, and a designer to share some design decisions I made a...
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Implications of something I learned from my internship

Working on my internship project was the first time I worked on a large mobile application development project. Before my internship, the only experience I had with mobile application development was from an online CodePath course where I learned about Android mobile development with Java. Although I never had any training with front-end mobile application development with React-Native, I designed web applications with React which gave me the basics of React components. I learned most of the technologies required by my internship as I worked through the project, and I successfully hit the project requirements. I took online courses in Advanced Java, Kotlin, Typescript, and React-native to implement different parts of the project. Additionally, I spent time debugging the existing code to understand how different features in Microsoft Teams mobile are implemented. One lesson I have learned from my internship, that I will apply in my future career, is having the flexibility to learn new s...
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A goal I achieved from your internship and the lesson I learned

This was the last week of my internship. The first goal was to build a react-native component that allows customers to view summarized information on Viva Topics. This goal entailed creating the different parts of the component with dummy data, then fetching real data into the card, before adding styles to the component. I spent three weeks of my internship building the react-native component. Then, I had a demo presentation to my manager and team to receive feedback on the component. I also met with the product designer and product manager on my team to discuss the styling and theming of some parts of my component. I continued working on that component as I moved on to adding an entry point. An entry point is a feature that triggers another feature to show. In my case, I had to add a feature in Microsoft Teams that allows a customer to view the react-native component I built. For the start, I added an entry point in Teams Android and tested how the feature was working. I was not able ...
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What I have done that I thought I wouldn't do during my internship

 This is the last week of my internship. As I prepared my final project presentation, I reflected on my progress throughout the internship. I remember when my mentor explained my internship project and how confused I was about the many uncertainties around parts of the project. This confusion was exacerbated by my little experience with mobile application development. I never thought I would hit the project milestones because I had to learn different technologies to understand the existing code and implement my project. Although I had worked with React during my first internship, I did not get to the more complex parts of React like React Hooks and call back functions. However, the react-native component I was building my project off required knowing how state is managed with React hooks. This was the most confusing part of working on the react-native part of the project. Callback functions were a new idea that I did not know if I would understand. I was excited to have a fully w...
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What I would change about my internship experience

This was the second to last week of my internship as a software engineering intern in One Drive and SharePoint at Microsoft. I was drafting my final project presentation slides when I asked myself what I could change about my internship experience if I would start it all over. One thing I would change about my internship is not spending so much time on the engineering design document and trying to understand all the tiny details of how my project was to work together. My initial plan was to spend about two instead of three weeks writing the engineering design document for my project. I spent more time trying to confirm that the approach I presented in the document was an approach that worked with the project I was building my solution off. However, having a close to working approach did not matter during my engineering design document review session. My manager and team really wanted me to have thought through the bigger-picture parts of my project and not the tiny details. Since ...
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How I would describe my internship experience in a behavioral interview

 I have been a Software Engineering intern on the Content Search and Insights (CSI) team that works on the front-end of the Viva Topic pages, specifically on integrating topic pages in different Microsoft 365 products like Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, and others. My internship project was to create and integrate the first Viva Topic page summary, called a Viva Topic card, into Teams Mobile clients. I started with writing an engineering design document to explain my planned approach for the project. Then, I presented this design document to my team for approval of concept before I moved on to the development phase of the internship. My internship project was the first time working on a large mobile application development project. The main technologies used were React-Native, Typescript, Java, and Kotlin. Although I had basic understating with Java and React-Native, I had never worked with Kotlin. It was challenging to understand, debug, and code in programming languages I had little...
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Networking outside my immediate team

Networking outside my team has been in two ways: making new connections and strengthening previous networks from past internships. I have had so many in-person and remote intern events to support networking with full-time engineers and fellow interns. At the start of my internship, I signed up for the intern networking program where I was paired with a full-time employee from any organization in Microsoft. My connections through the program ranged from software engineers to Marketing managers. I organized coffee chats with these employees where I learned about the projects they were working on, their experiences at Microsoft, transitioning to full-time engineers, and general Microsoft work culture. One coffee chat that stood out to me throughout the summer was a chat I had with a full-time software engineer who studied Commerce for their Undergraduate degree, worked in Real-estate business, and pivoted into Technology two years ago. Listening to their non-traditional and very determin...
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