Find out what our Guest Bloggers are getting up to. Throughtout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers as they find a placement or keep us updated as to what they are doing on their placement. Click here to read all entries from our bloggers or click here to meet them.

Hello,

Thanks for reading what is my 2nd blog and 1st first since starting at Microsoft 3 weeks ago.

So much has happened in the 3 weeks if I wrote everything it would probably take about 4 pages so I’ll try and keep it as short and sweet as possible.

5/7/09 Induction week

I get dropped off with Dan and Marcus at the Novotel hotel after my first night out in Reading with my new awesome housemates (7 MS students in one house=uni with money). Had the usual introduction talks and hastily made it to the bar, long story short the rest of the night was a good one.

We did too much to describe every day so the highlights of the week were. Meeting really senior people, trip to the London offices, clay pigeon shooting, archery, inflatable football and volleyball, free x boxes, free company BBQ with 1400 people, free corporate tickets to Oasis at Wembley, the hotel facilities and finally the nights out with 70 other amazing interns!

13/7/09 First week of real work

I am lost!!!! Microsoft is bigger and sells more products than you ever imagined. It uses ‘English’ that you’ve never heard of and talks in numbers that are hard to comprehend. To say it was a little overwhelming is an understatement. This week was spent doing admin and meeting various people from around the business for coffee to try and get an idea of where I sat in this huge machine. Don’t get me wrong though, I was having a great time and had enjoyed every second of the experience so far.

20/7/09 Second week of work

Majority of my team vanished before I really had chance to speak to them. They had gone to the Microsoft global exhibition (MGX) in Atlanta. In truth this was a blessing because it gave me a second week to try and get my head round Microsoft as a company and what the hell it was my department actually did (I knew nothing about servers or the software that makes them work).

In addition to this my manager Matt (a legendary Aussie bloke) had left me 3 tasks to look at. 1) Investigate how we can utilise social networking sites to better communicate with out target audiences. 2) Report on the current sales and marketing handover and how the lead generation pipeline could be improved. 3) Organise the July team meeting and an end of year meeting/social for the ‘App Platt’ team.

Take it easy… Colin