Lessons from challenges in my internship experience

 One of the major challenges I have had throughout my internship is not having someone on my immediate team with prior experience on my project. This meant that I either spent time trying to figure out how to solve the bugs I had, or I spent time finding a point of contact outside my team with experience with the area of the code I was working on. After a few weeks in my internship, I discovered that there are two teams in Microsoft China and Norway offices who have more experience with some parts of my project. Discovering these teams and connecting with their engineers has helped me quickly overcome major blockers in my internship.

Working with teams in and outside my organization has taught me how to cohesively communicate. Since the two major teams I work with are outside the United States, I always aim at adding as much details as possible to get a timely answer that will unblock me fastest. I did not learn how to communicate completely until I had a question go unanswered for over a week because of my poor communication. In my first week, I asked an engineer on the team in China a question about a build error that was preventing the application from running. The question was incomplete, and we had to have a back-and-forth chat about details for the engineer to understand my problem. However, with a nine-hour time difference between our working hours, I got the errors resolved after a week. Since then, I have learned to always add error messages, screenshots, and details to my questions to get quality feedback in the shortest time.