On Wednesday (7th November) I was in a Manchester University (not sure which one, but it was the one pretty much next to the main train station!) representing Microsoft and promoting the Industrial Year/Internship and Graduate schemes at Microsoft UK.

The day was very quiet and a fairly disappointing turn out in general, but seen as it was the first careers fair I’ve been to (as a student or a promoter really) it was interesting. It was great talking to other potential MS interns or graduates and telling them about my experience so far at Microsoft.

If anyone who is reading this wants any more info on the Internship or Graduate opportunities at Microsoft UK then check out www.microsoft.com/uk/graduates for more details and information on how to apply. Also feel free to email me any questions you might have (Roy [at] Herrod.co.uk)

On Wednesday evening I went to Paris for a 2 day training course as part of my internship at Microsoft, the training course was on the Thursday and Friday. Seen as I was there I decided to extend my stay and enjoy the weekend in Paris, giving myself chance to see Paris for the first time (that I can remember, I believe I may have been as a very young child).

Paris is a beautiful city with a lot of historical buildings engraved with fantastical sculptures. Everyone says how beautiful Paris is and TBH I never really believed it, well honestly I still think its a little over hyped, but it really is a very good looking old city.

Whilst in Paris on Saturday I came across a Transportation expo, or something like that, which had examples of many transportation means of the future. These included self driving electric cars, standard family electric cars, boats that cleaned the ocean, segways, one man/child formula one style vehicles, Trams, trains and even a space ship (well a prototype of the future of space travel). I’m aware that it’s a little sad that I went to Paris and spent an hour or so, of my one day of sightseeing, looking around a Transportation expo, but it was actually quite interesting and renewed both my ambition to own a segway and one day travel into space.

Finally an explanation of the title of this post; I was supposed to be returning to London from Paris on Sunday evening travelling with Air France but due to their strike my flight was cancelled. So Sunday morning was spent making a few long calls to the travel organisation company used by Microsoft in an attempt to get myself sorted on a new flight back to London. I was told this would take some time as Air France were very busy and so any attempt to contact them meant being on hold for a long period of time, with this knowledge I left my travel arrangements in the hands of the company and went for a little more sightseeing with some people in Paris. Whilst wondering around I found the Air France office and decided to go inside and sort out my flight myself, as well as Zach’s who flew with me. After a little ‘negotiation’ I managed to get us both a flight back Monday afternoon on a flight which meant we had to be promoted to business class Jwhich was no bad achievement.

(The above post was written in a Holiday Inn in the North East of Paris on Sunday night!)

…is the cleverest psychological ploy ever thought up by businesses. The idea is that you can go to work pretty much at whatever time you want and finish whenever too, as long as you get your work done nobody minds. why is it so clever? well I don’t know but, for some reason I cant really fathom, I’ve been working from before 9 everyday and finishing sometime after 6 (mostly closer to 7 and even as late as 8 on the odd occasions)! I find myself thinking “I’ll just finish this little bit and then head off” before I know it I’ve been working a lot more than people who are on strict time sheets. I’m not the only one, there’s pretty much always at least 1 person in my team (of 10) at work before me and there’s only been 2 occasions when Ive been joint last to leave!

I guess as long as you are enjoying what you  are doing (like I do) it doesn’t really matter.

Monday was spent being briefly introduced to the technologies used in MSTV and how the IPTV solution worked in general. Also I got my desk cleared, a desktop PC setup and my MS login and email accounts sorted!

At 6AM Tuesday morning Matt (a current intern who is my ‘buddy’ [mentor] at MSTV until he leaves), Zach and I got a taxi to Heathrow airport for a flight to Amsterdam. The reason is that MSTV have a second European development lab in Amsterdam and the guy in charge of that is leaving next week, so we had to meet him to get an idea of how to manage the Amsterdam labs. Most of Tuesday was spent at the Amsterdam MSTV office getting to know how to manage the Amsterdam lab remotely so that we can use and organise it from back in the UK when the guy leaves.

Wednesday morning we flew back to England and got back into Reading, and then back into the office, by about 2PM. After sorting my emails and other bits out for a few hours we were then unexpectedly invited to the MSTV department social (as a few people had dropped out, we weren’t invited in the first place because the numbers had to have been confirmed a month prior), the social this month was Go Karting! So after not being back at the office for more than a few hours we went down to the local Go Karting track for a 3 hours stamina Go Karting competition. The competition was between teams which were randomly selected, there were 7 in total all with between 4-5 members from within MSTV.

Thursday and Friday consisted of a 2 day training course about the detailed architecture of IPTV. There was a lot of information to take in during these two days but it all made sense and hopefully most (if not all) of it has stuck. I’m quite impressed that I knew nothing about IPTV, its architecture or even servers in general before this course but now it all just seems logical and really quite interesting. I won’t detail any information here because, again, I don’t know how much of it is common knowledge, but what I will say is that I think it’s a very exciting (fairly) new technology which Microsoft is going to do very well with.

The first week for us (the interns) at Microsoft was called the induction week, this week consisted of ‘Death by PowerPoint’ from Monday to Wednesday, that is 3 full days of presentations from various senior members of MS UK. In all honesty these 3 days were full of some really interesting information about what various departments aimed to achieve and how they operated. Obviously not every department could present during the 3 day period but a good selection did.

On the Tuesday night of this week there was a social event for all of the new interns, organised by the current interns who were running the induction week. This however involved some good and bad news, the good news was that there would be plenty of FREE drinks as MS had put a nice sized tab behind the bar for us! The bad news was that, thanks to the current interns, in order for us to receive these free drinks we all had to go in fancy dress made out of up to 5 bin bags. However this wasn’t as bad as it sounds, like most other people I simply made a single garment using a bag. J I just cut the bottom off of a bag and made a nice cape out of it!

Thursday brought a change of pace in comparison to the previous 3 days, as it was the Microsoft UK Annual Conference. This year it was held at the newly built Wembley Stadium, so at about 11 we caught a coach from TVP along with about 1000 other MS employees. The conference started at about 1PM, after a buffet lunch, and finished around 5:30. The conference gave a good insight into the business and finance side of MSUK as well as some information on the aims of MSUK this coming year.  After the conference there was another buffet and free drinks

Friday was my, and all of the intern’s, first day with my department. This wasn’t actually the first day as it was only a half day with the afternoon left for people to find accommodation if they hadn’t already. The few hours I spent with my department on this day was mainly to meet and greet some of the main people in the MSTV department and to receive my laptop and other equipment. It however turned out that my laptop was broken (the screen had a 2inch white strip down the middle when turned on) and the desks we (me and Zach) were going to have were covered in hardware that had built up in the last few months since the desks had been empty. So in all nothing was achieved apart from meeting a few members of the department.

I’ve intentionally been sparse on details about the presentations and conference etc for 3 reasons. The first is I cant be bothered to type in great detail about them at the moment. The second is that I’m not sure whether I’m allowed to or not, some of the information (in particular a couple of points made in the Xbox presentation) wasn’t public at the time and so I thought it would be easier to just not write anything that may get me in trouble J. Thirdly if I wrote absolutely everything here I would have nothing to talk about if asked by any of the 3 (at the most) people who may read this.