Microsoft Interns Code and Collaborate Their Way to Future Success
What better way to promote team bonding and collaboration among young tech enthusiasts, than to challenge them to develop an app?
Last year's Microsoft Student Programme in Taiwan did just that, bringing together a group of avid university interns to create an app that integrated role-playing elements with the familiar Monopoly game format. The game app was successfully created in just under two months.
Student participants in rapt attention during their Leadership Camp
“Through building the app together, we experienced how we could use code to bring our different ideas and contributions to life. Later, it gave us great satisfaction to see fellow interns from different departments use the app to interact and coordinate various activities during our Leadership Camp,” said Kevin Hsu Wei-chien, who worked at Microsoft Taiwan two days a week over his 12-month internship stint.
143 students from 37 different universities made up last year’s batch of Microsoft student interns in Taiwan
Attached to the Legal and Corporate Affairs department, Kevin was one of the student leaders from the recent FY15 batch of 143 Microsoft Taiwan interns.
The annual Microsoft Student Programme is designed to expose our student interns to the different facets of the tech industry, and encourage them to explore future career opportunities in information technology. Each of the interns is handed a broad range of responsibilities, from supporting marketing-related projects to managing internal activities within Microsoft. They were given the opportunity to hone their work skills in areas such as language translation, event and conference planning, and website design and management.
Our interns also play a vital role as outreach ambassadors on behalf of Microsoft to support various initiatives, helping us shape communities and the business of tomorrow.
A key focus of the programme is to immerse the students into the fast-paced world of programming and commercial app development. For instance, students last year joined a team of developers from ChocoLabs, a Taiwanese startup co-founded by former Microsoft intern David Liu, to develop a mobile app called Ubike using the Azure platform.
The Ubike app was showcased at Microsoft Taiwan’s YouthSpark Forum in November 2014. Mapping out the best cycling routes in metropolitan areas such as Taipei and Taichung, the app became an instant hit among consumers with more than 20,000 active users each month.
Another memorable highlight involved a flash mob held by the interns at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall last September. The flash mob activity was part of a broader campus-wide campaign to drum up interest in technology among local university students.
Having made their first forays into the tech industry, the student interns are now armed with the confidence and basic coding skills to realise their future potential. Kevin relishes not just the knowledge he amassed, but also the opportunity to be sharing the experience with his peers from many different backgrounds.
“Working with such a diverse group of individuals, I learned the key attributes of becoming an effective leader and the importance of clear communications. I am now involved with the planning and execution of activities for the next batch of Microsoft interns, and I look forward to sharing with them what I learned!” Kevin said.