Microsoft - Azure Cloud Program Manager Intern

SUMMER OF 2020

Mid-quarantine, completely virtual — I returned to Microsoft for another internship on Microsoft’s Cloud E2E Product Lifecycle Management team.

My Intern projects: Process Maps and Power BI Reporting

I was able to learn and consult three different teams that were SMEs for processes that went on within the org. Using Process Navigator, I published these three processes in order for the entire org to have that insight. I learned that understanding the entire end to end process for deploying Azure hardware is key for efficiency and visibility across all teams.

Also, I learned how to use Power BI and was able to drill down into a ~262KB XML Catalogue file that held all backend metadata for the 400+ process maps that were already published within the team. I developed two R Scripts to serve as the Power BI’s data source and to clean the data.

I created two dashboard reports that: 1) Brought insight into the current state of processes available, and 2) Gave process creators insight as to which processes have missing metadata to ensure high-quality maps.

Overall Internship Project Scope & Impact

Intern-Intern Panel for CHIE & CSCP

As all the summer interns (and Full-Time Employees) were completely isolated and virtual, I really missed the in-person experiences that I had the summer before. With the support of my mentor/manager, I asked some of the past intern colleagues I had worked with to be panelists in an “Intern to Intern” talk! The goal was for the current interns to gain some insight into how the transition between intern to full-time was, and also offer an opportunity to connect with others!

Overall — this was super fun to put together!

Microsoft - Azure Cloud Supply Chain Intern

SUMMER OF 2019

microsoft_internday — Microsoft Intern Day

A day with fun events for all of the ~3000 interns

My Intern Project: An Automated Mapping of Dependencies for Deployment

I spent the summer studying all of the dependencies that went into deploying a cluster for Microsoft Azure. From a customer point of view, I developed an automated map that shows the critical, high-level dependencies of the deployment process for customer services, using a visual graph database, Neo4j. This graph had a lot of business potential because it would offer the opportunity to minimize capacity lead time and reduce operating expenses. My hope for the final product was a predictive map that would be able to help forecast demand, planning times, and optimizing cost/revenue.

The Culture

One of the things that I appreciated the most about my internship at Microsoft was the culture. Everyone I met was so willing to help, to meet you, learn more about you… it wasn’t just work, work, work, all the time. It was relaxed, and I felt very comfortable being myself. My manager was vital to my overall experience — he pushed me out of my comfort zone to do things I knew I needed to get better at. He saw my strengths and weaknesses and gave me so many opportunities to improve them both. I loved that I had that opportunity to grow. Also, I grew a lot mentally over the course of the summer, as I dealt with mental my mental health. I felt fully supported by everyone around me, even if they didn’t know what was going on, everyone’s willingness to help was amazing. Melinda Gates wrote about the culture at Microsoft in her book, “The Moment of Lift,” and how it used to not be this way. The environment used to be tense and worried about work only — which might work at some companies, but it definitely would not work for me. I appreciated how Melinda Gates talked about how she worked to improve the culture bit by bit over the course of her time there, and it was pretty cool to reflect on the differences after my internship ended.

Culture at work is one of the most important things to me, stemming from the culture I found in my mobile apps course in high school. My teacher, Ron Kennedy, always made sure we supported one another, that we were relaxed, that we worked together as a team. I attribute most of my passion for technology to him. He showed me how important technology is, and how there are so many opportunities to go out and follow your passion and make the world better by using it. My past internships further demonstrated this — and they showed me just how important a good work culture is to individuals.

IBM - Robotic Process Automation Internship

Summer of 2018

Experience, Agile, Growth...

...and a deeper passion for technology.

At this internship, my job was to create software robots to automate extensive, manual work done normally by a human, and allow my client to focus on higher priority tasks.

I learned how to use Blue Prism, which is an automation software, only during the first week in a Botcamp before I was assigned my first projects. Process Automation is a growing field in technology, and I was so excited to be a part of it.

Two Individual Projects

Over the course of the summer, I spent my time on two different projects. We used a process to identify every project that we worked on.

I spent about two weeks simply talking with the Subject Matter Expert (SME). Then, I moved into development, where I consistently document my work and communicate with my team and SME through daily standups and meetings, or by email/Slack.

One of them was for a team in Canada & Brazil, and the purpose was to get contract data from an online database and move it into another database, as a way to track their revenue. This robot worked mostly with databases and Internet Explorer. It doesn’t sound complicated, but I couldn’t imagine trying to copy & paste the data back and forth for hours everyday. Not to mention, there was one specific field that needed to be filled, and the data for this field could only be found in an Excel sheet. Scanning by eye was easy, but it took me some time to develop a consistent and accurate method to find this value.

My other robot was also a moving contract data, but the contracts were found in a database with 25,000+ records in it. This literally made my robot crash initially when it was parsing through the contracts, and it set me back a couple weeks because my team nor I could find a solution. We finally thought of using SQL, which was totally a “duh” moment for me, to pull in the data and parse it. I also integrated an Excel Macro that would do this, and send it back to my robot. I was so proud when I finally found that solution, and it reminded me of why I love being an engineer – problem solving! To hear a bit more about what I did, watch our presentation video below.

Presentation & Demonstration

At the end of the summer, my team and I did a presentation in front of other IBM interns and IBM managers/executives. The audience was from a variety of teams–software, marketing, procurement–which made it slightly more scary going into it. For the week leading up to our presentation our team worked for hours trying to plan out what we wanted to say in the short 5-minute time frame we had.

Watch Our Presentation video Below:

Here is my team's internship presentation after our summer interning at IBM in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Watch to learn more about our roles as Robotic Process Automation developers, and our overall experience.

Side Projects

Of course, not all of my time was devoted to simply two projects.

Throughout the summer, I worked towards getting badges offered by IBM, including my Design Thinking Practitioner and Agile Practicer badge.

Also, I had a chance to work on a video to advertise RPA since it is so new. I helped with video planning & voiceover, which was a great project aside from my two main projects.

My Team

truly a team that I will never forget!

Our team was agile, so we did tasks in 2 week sprints. We had daily standups, where we would briefly update everyone on our progress and identify any blockers we were facing in our development and progress. I worked with three other interns, who were around the same age as me, and had the same knowledge about RPA coming into the internship as I did (almost none). We learned together and helped each other on our projects, which really contributed to the growth I feel I’ve acquired over this internship. Having this team was a blessing – if I was stuck on a certain portion of my robot, or just wanted to work through the logic of one aspect, someone was always there to help.

NCWIT Women in Computing Award

An honor...

I was a 2017 recipient of the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing. I was chosen as an Affiliate Award Winner or Honorable Mention because of my computing-related aspirations and for my demonstrated interest in technology, solid leadership ability, academic history, and plans for post-secondary education. I join almost 2,300 other young women from all over the United States honored at the Affiliate level.

In addition, I also received one of the highest leadership scores in the nation for my demonstrated leadership capabilities.

The Yanu – My Very Own Company

During my senior year of high school, I became a founder of my very own company.

This summer, I got the opportunity to travel to Fiji to further develop my app. I enjoyed real coca-cola floats beachside while developing my app.

An outdated & inefficient method of data management at a boutique resort in Fiji caught my mobile application development teacher's eye.

With my mobile apps teacher and eight students, I led the development of an app that would be integrated into this resort's system to more effectively manage their important information.

During the beginning stages of this process, a lot of work was put into UI development and managing data – my team and I created several mockups of our app, as well as entity-relationship diagrams to ensure that data would flow efficiently. After these processes were complete, we moved onto developing our app. We developed our app using Swift – our app would be on an iOS Platform. We made it our goal to have our product running on iPads at this boutique resort.

Translated to English, "yanu yanu" means "island" in Fijian, which is why my company is called "The Yanu."

Written in Swift, the following piece of code will capture a signature to be stored or used in the future.

//this is the button connection that will clear the signature view
@IBAction func clearSignature(_ sender: UIButton) 
{
// This is how the signature gets cleared
    self.signatureView.clear()
}
//this is the button connection to save the signature and move on to the pdf viewer
@IBAction func saveSignature(_ sender: UIButton) 
{
}
// The delegate methods gives feedback to the instanciating class
func finishedDrawing() 
{
   print("Finished")
}
func startedDrawing() 
{
   print("Started")
}
    
//this says to save the image of the signature when the button to the next page is pressed
override func prepare(for segue: UIStoryboardSegue, sender: Any?) 
{
   if segue.identifier == "save"
  {
       if let signatureImage = self.signatureView.getSignature(scale: 10) 
         {
            print(signatureImage)
            //this sets the signature image  to captured image
            capturedImage = signatureImage
            print(capturedImage)
            // Since the Signature is now saved to the Photo Roll, the View can be cleared anyway.
            self.signatureView.clear()
          }
     }
 }

Verizon App Challenge

Best in State Award

The Verizon App Challenge is a nationwide challenge that focuses on the development of a mobile app. Each team (5-7 members) submit a fully developed app idea. In 2014, five team members, including myself, won Best in State for our “Cylent Witness” app.

Concept

The app "Cylent Witness" takes a new approach towards reporting crimes in the school and the community. Instead of physically having to fill out an incident report, our app allows users to anonymously submit evidence or sightings of disturbances in the community. Snap a picture, take a video or audio recording, or just submit a voice recording. The exact location and time of the incident will be automatically handled utilizing the functions already present in the mobile device. Then with the tap on a screen, an electronic evidence report is sent to the school itself or the local agencies. This solves the problem of having to take evidence into the designated school or agency. Also, users will be able to adjust the settings of the app to fit their personal needs. If the user desires to be non-anonymous when they send in evidence, the recipient of the information will be able to reach you for further questioning. Additionally, information can be sent anonymously with the flip of a switch. Users will be able to choose the way the evidence gets sent to the authorities: email, text messaging, and calling will be three of the options that our app uses to report an incident.

Wireframe

Screen Shot 2017-12-21 at 1.03.09 PM.png

STEP 1

The homepage of our idea, featuring the capability to take a photo or video of the situation that was witnessed.

Screen Shot 2017-12-21 at 1.04.27 PM.png

STEP 2

The camera screen features different capabilities in order to obtain the best picture or video possible.

Screen Shot 2017-12-21 at 1.02.21 PM.png

STEP 3

The summary screen includes the video or photo taken, a description of the situation, and the location that the situation occurred at.