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My interview experience with Microsoft

It was during the winter break after the first semester that I felt like I was somehow managing to survive in the lonely mushy pond, L-1170 at Chapin. It lacked the presence of my room-mate. To add more to anxiety was the preposterous lab work with the pressure of earning some kind of funding for the semester to come. This was when to my surprise an email from Microsoft, interested in having an interview with me dropped into my inbox like a positive ray slit through the dark clouds of apprehension. It was 11th January, the most awaited day so far at Stony Brook. I wanted to prepare a lot for the interview but I put my lab work to priority. I studied in the most conventional way. I incremented the hits on websites ranked highly by Google for the search string “Microsoft interviews”. It was the first telephonic interview I was going to have and also had to code through windows live meeting. It was 6pm EST in the evening on 22nd January and my heart was pumping at a high rate until it exh...

The Dance I learnt at Microsoft - BACHATA

The internz group at Microsoft is a resource of all the activities going around the campus. Always been passionate about dancing, the dance class at café 34 caught my attention. It was Wednesday and I was all prepared for the dance class since morning. I had a meeting with guys in Microsoft Research at 2 pm followed by a brain storming session with my mentor about the project. We played a pool game to freshen up. All was being so fruitful and I hoped the same for the dance class too :) I wrapped up my work and headed to café 34 with no expectations as such since I was pretty disappointed with the same dance class concept at stony brook. To my surprise I saw intern colleagues dancing on soothing notes of – the so called “Bachata”. Well sounded funny but I was more or less interested in the name rather than dancing. I was waiting for a while since I was late by 10 min as usual :). I was looking around for a partner. I saw a few gals dancing with other female partners. I wished if I could...

Lessons I learnt this semester - Fall 2007

Apart from the academics which has been the primary goal of me being in stony Brook, I believe the entire semester has been a series of educative experiences (cannot be put on a resume though:)). It gave me a chance to look into myself and learn a lot from others. The early days in the semester were tough ones getting acquainted to the climate, sparse population and moreover not being close to family and friends. Although hard, these were days of excitement. Exploring the campus, meeting people, discussing about their behavior, gestures, walking in the bright unpolluted sunshine to make our body ready for the cold weather. Calling parents, letting them know about US and keeping their excitement alive was all that I did. At the same time we friends were not together. I was temporarily accommodated in a different apartment. This was the time when I realized that how dependent are we on others and why man turned into a social animal:). Also not trying to be spiritual, but truly praying to...