Microsoft is one of the few companies involved in IPP Everywhere with an internship program open to Canadians. As such they were the sole reason I skipped a tutorial and visited the science and engineering career fair. My goal going in was to get an internship where I could work on libjtapi.
The recruiters at the Microsoft booth were very friendly and I chatted with them about myself and the Windows printing subsystem. After taking my resume the recruiter invited me to a presentation that evening Microsoft which was hosting about their internship program.
I of course already knew about the presentation and had been hounding a few friends (comp sci majors) to attend with no success.
Later that day I dragged a different friend (bio/medicine major) with me to Microsoft’s recruitment presentation. The presentation lasted an hour and ended in a last call for resumes and a raffle draw for t-shirts. My poor friend actually won a t-shirt but the recruiter wasn’t able to read his hand-writing and we only found out the ticket was his after the draw. Somehow I also won. They gave me perhaps the best t-shirt of the lot, pictured above it features binary sheep. Little did I know that Microsoft was not giving out North American sized t-shirts, my “medium” was far to small. This is quite a miss-sizing since I actually North American smalls.
Still I am very glad I attended the presentation. The three recruiters were in fact engineers! One Project Manger, a Testing Engineer, and a Software Engineer. Compared to this Google only sent one HR recruiter. Where as the Google presentation left me cynical, “Google is only attempting to trawl for more resumes” the Microsoft presentation gave me no such impression. The presentation was delayed a bit: the Project Manager was not able to start the slideshow without powerpoint crashing. The funny part being that said Project Manager was from the Microsoft Office team.
The presentation itself was rather generic: “We have happy interns!”, “You can code!”, “You should work at Microsoft!”.
A week after the presentation Microsoft emailed me to schedule a first stage interview. Microsoft is flying two interviewers onto campus in 4 days to interview us candidates. If I pass this 30 minute interview Microsoft will fly me out to Redmond for 4 hours of technical interviews. That’s a whole 4.5 hours of technical interviews exactly 125% more interviews than Google, it should be a lot of fun.
Update 2012-10-18: I got the on campus interview with Microsoft!
Update 2013-10: If you are still interested please consider reading through the overview of my internship.