Sleepless in Seattle:         Network, Network, Network

How time flies… I’m in my 5^th week of the internship and I try to network as much as possible. I Network with people in my team, in my division, in my company and with other MBA’s. Most of the network is done through lunch meetings and coffee breaks – you probably know what I’m talking about. Although it is pretty easy to stay in my room, crunching presentations and data to provide some sort of useful output to my group I prefer to fill-up my day with meetings – and my nights with the crunching and reading and processing the data.

My networking can be divided into 3 types. The first is the most important one – the internal division network. I am engaging in meetings and casual conversations with people from my own group and division to learn about them and their day2day work. To understand how they could help me with my project, what is it like to work with and around them and just to enjoy the company of very smart and fun people. The second kind is the future type – I try to meet with people from different divisions and different roles in the company to understand how the big picture comes together, to see the vision of other people in different positions around the company. The third type is the MBA connection – I try to attend all the organized events that the Microsoft recruiters sponsor and the unofficial ones also.

But more than everything I try to manage time to be with my family. I haven’t seen them for 4 weeks and my entire first MBA year was mainly around recruiting and networking, so the time I spent with my wife and kids was pretty limited. I can’t say I have much more time now but it is much better than before. So most of the days I try to be home around 19:00-20:00 be with my kids for couple of hours and back to some work around 23:00.

                                                                                                                Till next time,

                                                                                                                                Barak

Sleepless In Seattle,

That at least what my new manager told me. A week ago I met my senior director – who will be my boss's boss in the summer and he already gave me the assignment for the summer: "Hard Work". So let us start from the beginning, I'm a MBA of 2013, going to intern with Microsoft in the Business division. I will work on a product in the name of "Lync" and hopefully will touch all the business aspects for the product (business planning, marketing, product management and engineering). One of the most exciting issues about this summer is the fact that Lync is one of the newest products from Microsoft and has the potential to replace all the internal phone-system servers with a computer based communication system.

That is only half of the summer, since I'm taking my family with me to Seattle and intend to spend as much time as possible with them. I will drive my car the 2,300 miles to Seattle from Ann Arbor while my wife and two kids will fly out to Seattle (6 days instead of 5 hours). On our way back we intend to cross the country on a long roadtrip and visit the Yellowstone National Park and Mount Rushmore.

I really hope that I would be able to combine those two main tasks – family and internship – and to enjoy every minute of the beautiful summer in Washington.