TECC 280: The Power of Internships for Engineering Students

In this episode, we talk to Marcus Fontoura, Former Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Azure, as well as Zuzu Tang, a software engineer at Microsoft, about the power of internships and the impact that new-in-career engineers can have on projects for Microsoft Azure, including going from intern to full-time employee. Engineering Quotes: Here Are Some of the Key Points Discussed About the Power of Internships for Engineering Students: Democratizing computing is about making cloud services available to everyone and helping them be more productive. This can be done by managing the compute, data centers, power infrastructure, and cooling infrastructure at a large scale and in an efficient way. The smart load intelligence project is about understanding the workloads in Azure better. It entails making the correct machine learning predictions for the data. The Microsoft Internships Experience lets interns work on good projects and allows for good networking. Interns also have a chance to continue working at Microsoft once they have completed their studies. When looking to join an internship, look for a company where you agree with its mission and values. Look at how the company supports learning and growing and see how your future in that company would be. When looking for internships, look for places that have an active internship program that would empower you by working on relevant projects. Look for programs where the company learns from the interns as much as they learn from the company. Ensure that you will feel like you are contributing to the company by the time your internship comes to an end. An internship will help you to experience what a career would be like in that field of work. You will learn about the different roles in the different fields and talk to the different types of people in those roles. You will also see what soft skills are needed to fill the roles effectively. You cannot solve the world's problems by yourself, but it will be better if everyone works together to solve them. To work together effectively, everyone must be able to trust and collaborate. This cannot be done if some people feel like they cannot be themselves when they are at work. Everything must not only be what you can do for the company, but what the company can do for you as well. Joining organizations like Women in Tech will help you to connect with people and work on your leadership skills by helping to organize events. You can help by tutoring young girls and helping to get them interested in STEM. If you think you are not qualified or smart enough to get an internship in a big company, go to their recruiting events to get a better idea of what they are looking for. You might be pleasantly surprised by what they are looking for in interns. Develop a mindset that shows that you want to learn from the company and not only focus on what you can give to the company. Be curious and always be open to learning new things. More in This Episode… In the Take Action Today segment of the show, Zuzu talks about what early career engineers can do to start growing their careers early. About the Guests: Marcus Fontoura Marcus Fontoura is the former chief architect for Azure compute and managed the Azure efficiency team. He lead several projects that reduce the cost of serving Azure, including capacity management, power management, and machine learning for resource management. In his previous roles at Microsoft, Fontoura worked on the production infrastructure for Bing and in several Bing Ads projects, including both ads infrastructure and relevance. Before Microsoft, Fontoura was a Staff Research Scientist at Google (2011-2013), where he worked in the Search Infrastructure team. His focus was on the serving systems powering Google.com search.