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Hello!! I am Raj and I am focusing on Marketing and Finance. I am an international student, hailing from India. I moved to the states last August for grad school and it has been a great adventure, both in school (Go BDFH!**) and at my internship. 

This summer, I interned as a Finance Manager at  in Reno, NV. There were 104 other MBA interns, including myself, working on exclusive projects and the vast majority hailed from Ivy League universities. I was proud to represent the University of Colorado’s Leeds Business School. Classes like Market Intelligence, Corporate Finance and Quantitative Methods proved to be quite helpful during the course of the internship.

I was a part of the Operations Finance team, specifically working on LCC (License and Contract Compliance). I was a given the herculean task of tackling a problem in which I had to identify the top 2% of the riskiest customers from a massive pool of over 70,000 audit nominations. 

During the first four weeks of learning how the business worked, I spent about a week at HQ in Seattle, networking with different stakeholders and understanding how this process was completed in previous years. Other stakeholders were spread out in various places such as Florida, New York, Dublin and Singapore, making coordination a balancing act, where I had to work on the project and at the same time talk to as many people as I could to ensure that none of the aspects of the business were missed.

Essentially, my project had to be solved from an analytical point of view with improvised strategy because they wanted to change the whole targeting process. I quickly realized that it would be extremely difficult and impractical to design a solution using a rudimentary spreadsheet so instead, I decided to tackle the problem from a completely out-of-the box standpoint. Microsoft has an amazing pool of resources and it felt like a “choose your own adventure” game with all the tools available at my disposal. In short, I chose to use A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) to design my solution. 

The company has a fantastic work culture where even as an intern, you are supported continuously and given great visibility. They also encouraged me to sit in all of the site leadership meetings just to get a feel for how things work in the company. Moreover, they ensure our project is presented to various teams at the culmination of the internship.

The Fun Part:

Microsoft's internship program is well-structured with numerous events throughout its 12-week duration. In addition to the 'work' part, they do a great job of organizing a ton of non-work events. One of which was a speaker series (exclusively for MBA Interns) with Microsoft's core Leadership Team (i.e. the EVP's of various functions such as Finance, Marketing, HR, Legal, Gaming and Business Development AKA the CEO, CFO, CMO and so on).

Microsoft's internship program is well-structured with numerous events throughout its 12-week duration. In addition to the 'work' part, they do a great job of organizing a ton of non-work events. One of which was a speaker series (exclusively for MBA Interns) with Microsoft's core Leadership Team (i.e. the EVP's of various functions such as Finance, Marketing, HR, Legal, Gaming and Business Development AKA the CEO, CFO, CMO and so on). Microsoft also organizes a week called “Intern Signature Week” where all the summer interns spend an action-packed week in Seattle. In other words, it’s a fully paid pleasure trip highlighted by a concert with Armando Christian Pérez (Pitbull :P), an Intern Give night which included games and volunteering activities and a Women’s Symposium, one of the best events of the week. In addition, we also had an exclusive Q&A session with the CEO, Mr. Satya Nadella, and with Mrs. Melinda Gates. I also got a chance to be a part of Reno-specific events such as camps, other volunteering activities and intern-only morale events.

All in all, it was a great experience learning, networking and adopting a growth mindset at Microsoft. 

**BDFH stands for Big Dave’s Fun House, my core group for the MBA program and its members include Scott Ibaraki, Dave Smith, Michelle Saipe, Collin Jenkins & myself.