The name Microsoft Research Redmond, popularly called MSR, comes to mind when talking about the highest paying internships offered to students. It would not be wrong to claim that interns at MSR make more in 12 weeks, than what some make in an entire year!
Microsoft Research has an India Internship Program, through which they hire undergraduate students, pursuing Computer Science from the IITs, as interns. This is a great opportunity, as, for the rest of the world one needs to be pursuing a PhD to land an intern at Microsoft Research. The CS Department sent a list of students to MSR, who came back with a list of those shortlisted for interviews. And after two such rounds of interviews, I got my internship.
About the location, I was working with the Natural Language Processing group atMicrosoft Research, Redmond, located in the “Evergreen State” of Washington, in the far North-West Corner of the United States. Such is the influence of Microsoft in Redmond, one could say that the entire economy of the region is solely influenced by them. Popularly called the Bicycling Capital of the Northwest, Redmond is situated closeto the big and rainy city of Seattle. An interesting equivalence can be seen between KGP and Redmond, though, keep in mind, it’s the ratio which is similar, not the places themselves!
KGP : Kolkata : : Redmond : Seattle
About the internship itself, it was a wonderful learning curve for me. Make no mistake about it, the work was challenging and required a crazy number of hours to be spent in the office; nevertheless, it was great fun. And since they believe in the motto of “Work Hard but Play Harder”, it was not even close to being monotonous. There were a number of MSR sponsored outings, such as hiking, city tours, cruises, Intern vs FTE soccer matches, glassblowing and many more. Also, since the pay is awesome, almost all weekends culminated in trips to other places, both near and far (read NY, LA, Vegas, Vancouver).
To summarize, Microsoft knows how to take good care of their interns, and I mean it! And some advice to future interns from KGP, do not forget to take your driving license if you have one! Else, you too would meet my sorry fate and miss setting the Seattle roads on fire!
Mayank Shrivastava
4th Year Undergraduate
Computer Sc. & Engineering
