Zach Wener-Fligner (Garfield ’10), was a Microsoft intern the summer after his senior year.  Read more about the Microsoft high school intern program and apply for the coming summer!

My Project

This summer, I was lucky enough to be a part of the Microsoft High School internship program. I worked for SQL Server, Microsoft’s databse platform, in the Business Platform Division, a multibillion dollar division that creates software for businesses. During the summer, my primary project was to write a “toggler” program–a scalable program that could automate many of the startup and shutdown processes the BPD Operations guys needed to do monthly. Through this project, I learned C#, SQL, networking skills, and how to use SQL Server. I got to present my project to high school interns and to the rest of my department at the end of the summer.

Great Environment

The internship provides each high school intern with a mentor and a manager to help ensure that the summer is a success. These people know their stuff–I learned an incredible amount from them. I also met a lot of awesome kids from all around the Seattle area with interests in technology, which was great. In addition, we were able to attend some awesome lectures–I went to talks by Jeff Ma, card counter the Hollywood movie “21” is based on; Scott Guthrie, a Microsoft VP who was a lead developer on Visual Studio and .NET, and invented ASP.NET; and, of course, Steve Ballmer, who promised all of us interns free Windows 7 phones (not kidding!).

Connections

There were about 20 or 25 high school interns this year at Microsoft–but over 700 college interns. Working at Microsoft was a great experience partially because it provided me with a network of Microsofties that I can hopefully go through to get more internship experience later.

(51 votes, average: 3.22 out of 5)

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