Data Science Internship at Microsoft
Hey Everyone
Off the bat let me be clear that I wholeheartedly enjoyed the Internship at Microsoft. All the way from the start of the Internship I have always been supported by my whole team and I really loved the experience.
Azure Dedicated Hosts My first project was more about improving one of the main trackers in Azure. It was a really good way for me to get ramped up with Azure and the best Engineering practices in a company. Although my interview was for a Software Engineer, I was able to get a job as a Data Scientist as I was placed in a data scientist Team. I was able to get a great deal of exposure to the Azure Platform and the Azure Data Science Platform. The primary language used was Kustos Query Language which is kinda like the SQL language but with some extra features and specifications for Microsoft Internal Teams. I had a lot of fun doing this project and met a lot of folks from Microsoft Research and other teams.
Long Term Underutilized Nodes A little background of my team: I worked in the CCCPA (Capacity compute platform and analytics team in Azure Compute) where most of the work my team done is data mining and one of the main projects for Azure was to optimize and increase the efficiency to make Azure the most efficient and reliant and safe cloud in the world. My project was to optimize a subset of Nodes and figure out patterns using ML/AI tools and a lot of data mining work I was extremely passionate about the ML part and the research part in general. I also has the chance to work on some Interpret AI Ml models like the Explainable Boosting Classifier model from Microsoft Research. I was able to get a lot of exposure to the ML/AI and the research part as well as learn important concepts in Azure, Data Science and ML/AI. I also had the chance to present my work to many Technical Fellows and Principal Data Scientists and that was such a demanding task but I am glad I pulled through and got to work on it.
Life LessonsI have learned a lot from this internship and some of the key points are.
Important Points
I should have stuck to my role as a SWE Intern and not have accepted to change my role to a Data Science position. Some of you maybe thinking that why would I claim such a bold statement but this is important when your starting your career that you interview the roles that you are interested in and actually know that you can do well. I knew that I was confident in my skills as a SWE Intern as I had prepared some time off to read the best Software Engineering Practices and was prepared and in the first week when I came to know that I was in a data science team as a SWE intern I thought I would be okay but I should have clarified to the team in the start that my role is a SWE and should have switched teams( My recruiter told me this at week 12 that this is important as they would judge you to other data science interns and the work they do). I took on the challenge of being a Data Science Intern and tried my best to learn all of the best practices but I knew in me that I was clearly lacking the required skills, I literally have only taken 1 Statistics course and some ML courses and wasn’t really prepared but I am glad I had this experience as I learnt a lot and am much more prepared to be a Data Scientist in the future.
Be Passionate : This is I think one of the most important points I need to talk about. I am a very enthusiastic and energetic person and am extremely passionate about a lot of things ranging from Quantum computation to ML to Measure Theory etc and I still honestly haven’t found a field which I truly am passionate about and want to go deep into but I did have very specific subsets like NLP, CV and ML work in general which I liked working on. I think the key to any internship is being passionate about the work you are assigned to and giving it your all and I learnt it the hard way wherein I was excited about the work I was assigned but I wanted to also maximize the opportunities at Microsoft and hence spoke to most of the Research teams but instead should have spent the time getting my hands dirty on the data assigned and trying to explore more and I will admit the domain knowledge required was a lot but I did my best and learnt this the hard way when in my final week they mentioned these traits to me.
Future I have decided not to go back to Microsoft for next summer as my passions did not align with what the team does and it genuinely did not feel like the best fit, Yes I could have switched teams but it was very late that I realized this and my team had informed me pretty late about their decision and I think at the end whatever the outcome was I am happy with my choice. I completely understand why my team feels like even if I did return next summer I would not be happy with the work and hence why I choose to focus on either applying to a different company or doing research next summer and have a stronger application for my graduate school.
Thanking Remarks I want to thank everyone at Microsoft for all their support and help and also for getting the chance to meet esteemed singers such as OLIVIA RODRIGO, ZEDD, ONE REPUBLIC AND YUNGBLUD ! I had a lot of fun on intern day and finally thank you God for this opportunity and my family and friends for supporting me.
Robert~