MSOZACADEMICUWA MSPs would like to announce their Live Mesh Competition.
Simply sign up for Live Mesh through our gateway and go into the draw to win a stack of prizes.
You can even increase your chances by adding your own content to our Mesh.
For more details and to sign up CLICK HERE.
Sign up now at: imagine.wamsp.com.au
We’ll elaborate a little more on the program and plan closer to the date, but for now – head over to imagine.wamsp.com.au and sign up so that you don’t lose your spot!
Don’t forget to tell / bring your friends!
For those who somehow missed the posters plastered around uni…
Note: This post relates to Microsoft Internships for the Software Desgin Engineer (SDE) and the Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) positions. It is also aimed at Australian students but might also be helpful to anyone applying for a job at Microsoft.
Microsoft offers US winter (AU summer) internships to Australian students currently completing university each year for the 3 months Dec – Feb. The internships are opportunities to work with a real Microsoft development team in Redmond. They are paid positions, including flights to the States. The process generally begins around the middle of the year, with offers going out around September. For this year, 2008, the offers have just been made.
Preparation is the key to getting an offer. You proceed through a variety of interviews on varying technical content. Here is how I prepared.
- Subscribe to Channel 8 and do a search on the archives for internships, interns, jobs and interviews. Channel 8 is a MSDN blog with a huge amount of quality content for students. Update: They now have a Careers section which is awesome!
- Subscribe to the Microsoft Jobs Blog. Also read through the archives. This blog has a huge numbers of tips, reader questions, sample interview questions and other content to help you get your offer.
- Study all the content at MIS Laboratory. This page has a good number of links to content that help, especially with behavioral interview style questions. It goes through the STAR technique and other techniques on how to answer questions such as “How do you move mount Fuji?”
- Become a fan to the Microsoft Careers Facebook Page and ask questions to the HR teams and checkout information posted there.
- Google/Bing for interview questions. I spent a huge amount of time just putting in queries that relate to questions. You can learn a lot from the experiences of others, and often people will have put up solutions to the problems they received.
- Practice solving problems. Actually do them. I went back over my previous labs from units at university that I knew would help me, such as writing simple string functions. Also, I competed in the ACM Programming Competition which was excellent preparation for writing code to interesting problems.
- Practice interview questions. Actually do them. You can find lists of interview questions online. Youtube has a lot of interview videos. But you need to focus on the doing and not just the reading.
- I found some very helpful practice is to re-write basically library functions. One way to do this is look at the basic C functions such as strstr, strtok, etc and re-write their functionality in another language, such as C# or Java. Look at basic string manipulation, number calculation functions, etc. Translating the functionality heaps you understand it, and is especially helpful if you choose to use another language in the interview.
- Apply for other Internships. As I personally have not a lot of time, I only applied for one other. A Google Internship position in Sydney. Not only does this force you to prepare, but it also help introduce you to some of the processes that these companies use.
- Ask for help. Try to find someone who has already been through the process (successful or not). You can normally find someone by asking your local Microsoft Student Partner.
- Learn about the products and determine what you’d like to work on. Generally interviewers want to see specific interest rather than, “I’m happy to do anything.” It shows you are focused and know what you want. So research the products.
- Read the book. How to move Mount Fuji.
- Brush up on your maths. Particularly discrete maths and basic binary maths.
Some more help preparation links (thanks Google 
)
- http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html
- http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/five-essential-phone-screen-questions
- http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/what-you-need-to-know
Getting an internship offer is a multi-stage process. Here is how it worked this year. It may change, but it will probably follow a similar format.
1. Respond to the advertisement for the internship when it comes out around mid year. It is normally posted on http://blogs.msdn.com/msozacademic/ and we’ll most likely post it on here too.
2. You will generally start off by sending your Resume by E-mail to the Australian recruiters in Redmond.
3. First lot of questions come through by E-mail. You basically fill out all the questions and send them back. The questions primarily relate to your current studies and previous experience in computing.
4. The next stage is a phone interview. It was done by HR recruiters from Kelly Services. It went around 30 mins long and tests you on very basic knowledge and problem solving skills. Some sample questions are:
- What is a stack/queue? How do you test a stack/queue?
- Explain the differences in memory management between C#/Java with C/C++.
- Explain the differences between Language A and Language B.
- The 3 light switch problem
- Problem solving a slow elevator in a tall building (process question)
5. If you pass the phone interview stage the next step was to attend technical interviews at the Microsoft office in Melbourne (Freshwater Place). Melbourne was the place for everyone I personally know (even Sydney guys) this time around, however some people have been interviewed in Sydney as well in the past. For us Perth guys, Microsoft flew us, all expenses paid to Melbourne for the interviews, and put us up in a nice hotel for the night. The technical interview stage comprised of 3x 30 min interviews. Two were technical, and one was HR. For each of the technical interviews you had to solve a particular problem in whatever language you wanted.
The recruiting team did an awesome job, and had our results out to us within a week. It’s either a good E-mail or a not so good one.
- The interviewers are not trying to trick you. So just step through the problem and approach it using the processes you have learnt.
- Believe in yourself. It’s not just about smarts. Some smarter people missed out while others have got in.
- Prepare as if it is a real full-time, permanent job. That is, do your very best.
Luke
MSP at UWA, Ex-Microsoft Intern
Awesome news just off the wire – three UWA students, including our very own MSP, Luke, are on their way to Seattle for this year’s batch of Aussie interns!
UWA had a strong representation at this year’s internship interviews in Melbourne, which is great for the uni and for all of those who tried out. A good effort was put in by all, but as they saw in Melbourne, there were a lot of candidates vying for those internship spots – but still, good on everyone for getting so far!
Congratulations Luke, David & Jeff!
Stay tuned throughout the summar as WAMSP will keep you up to date with the guys as we follow them through their internship.
The rumors had been bouncing around since Day 1. Its name had been whispered over lunch tables around TechEd. Circled by many on their personal timetable pages as a “Do Not Miss” event, WAMSP brings you first hand coverage from…
Mobile Smackdown!
Hannibal, Murdoch, B.A. Baracus and of course, face (i.e. the M-Team), took us on a wild ride around the current world of Windows Mobile devices, while injecting a bit of team spirit with swag throwers around the room and heaps of mini-mobile games that lead to giveaways of high-end devices such as the new Palm Treo and HTC Touch Diamond.
The M-Team:
And Colonel Decker even made an appearance:
Colonel Decker was also in on the party, travelling towards the M-Team’s location in realtime.
Between different demos people from the audience were brought up for miscellaneous games including, mobile Guitar Hero 3, eating cat food (!!!) for a mobile phone (3), and even a bench pressing competition. Who said that geeks can’t do push ups?
Congrats to all those who won things – especially the guys who ate the strudel & catfood and especially the guys who did the pushups and dispelled any myths about geeks being out of shape (I bet some of them are *cough* Wii Fit *cough* owners).
Some of the demo’ed devices (the on-screen interfaces reflect what is happening on the actual device):
One thing I was particularly impressed with was the lack of targeted competition bashing. There were small jabs, such as the consumption of apple & blackberry strudel, little reminders that sometimes it’s nice to be able to replace a battery and a small video about Google’s Android, but all in all it was kept friendly and humorous. Everyone was amicable – when someone emailed in to participate in a challenge and left the footer “Sent from my iPhone”, this was taken extremely well by the presenters. It’s nice to participate in an extremely fun (and loud) presentation about products and their capabilities rather than a clear competition bashing fest.
Google take a beating from CNet
There was also a viewing of the cool unboxing of the Omnia i900. Not a Microsoft movie (or Samsung) as such, but well worth the watch.
Kudos go out to the smackdown team (Windows Mobile in Australia, Rog42) as well who organised a massively awesome session with giveaways that literally, rained down from the sky!
Always drawing a little crowd, the Microsoft Surface set up in the MSDN lounge at Tech.ED is very cool.
After playing with the touch capabilities, you could be treated to an in-chair professional massage while a demonstration of it’s ability to read the event passes and pull down information from CommNet was shown.
Basically, on the back of the passes was a small pattern of white dots. They hold about 2 bytes of data. In this case they had encoded the delegate ID. Placing the pass on the surface would then allow the device to immediately connect to CommNet and pull down the particular delegate’s personal schedule for Tech.Ed.
Luke
UWA MSP
I’m sitting in a great session on Hyper-V (SVR304 Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Architecture Scenarios and Networking Deep Dive) where we’re getting an in-depth technical layout of Hyper-V how it works, what it does and how well it works (perhaps marketing speak, but I can confirm that Hyper-V rocks performance wise). Some of the VMs that are popping up on the screen during the demo portion are Novell SUSE – which in itself is cool enough.
Microsoft have had a very good relationship with Novell over their SUSE offering (although a quick search will show you that both companies have suffered a lot of online negative rap about these deals) although I’m still impressed that they would show it in a demo.
But I was blown up when Tux made a showing!
(and yeah, the photos are blurred – sorry 
)
As I looked back over my photos from yesterday’s keynote (below) I realised that there wasn’t that much information about the Keynote in yesterday’s post. So here’s what went down:
Photo Goodness:
Stay tuned for more!
Wow. Just Wow.
Sporting over 3500 delegates who will participate in over 200 sessions TechEd Sydney just kicked off with an amazing KeyNote that included free runners, concept videos (hopefully widely available soon) and, of course, the keynote speech by Amit Mital, lead of the Live Mesh project.
For those who haven’t checked it out yet Live Mesh is designed to allow automatic synchronisation of files (and later settings, applications – you name it) between multiple devices.
As part of the tech demos one of the presenters “let slip” and, in a worldwide first, showed Live Mesh for mobile which automatically synced photos he was taking of the keynote with his laptop! With the promise of Mesh developer APIs in a few months (think synch across all devices, even non-Microsoft, such an iPhone or your friendly coffee maker), Mesh is definitely something to keep your eyes on.
There’s something for everyone – technical sessions on every type of Microsoft (and some, just general) technology that you can think of, break out areas to relax and play Xbox, sandpit for mucking around on live systems and food (literally everywhere). 3 days of heaven
Stay tuned for photos and more updates as we progress through the next few days!
