14 DAY TRIAL // Women interns from the junior class of Brown University’s computer science department, that worked this summer at Microsoft in Redmond, were very excited about the experience and said that they had found new confidence for the future.
Whoever said that girls think computers are boring and words like “Windows” or “Microsoft” make them yawn, has not met the nine women in Brown University Computer Science Class Intern at Microsoft.
This summer, an entire “baseball team” made out of all of the junior class women from the computer science department at Brown were interning at Microsoft.
Usually surrounded by men, the nine gals enjoyed these few weeks of “girl talk” about favorite professors and classes at Brown, the college majors they started out with and what's like being a woman in a man's “computer science world.”
All in all it was an enriching experience that, as they say, they would repeat anytime, mostly thanks to the stimulating working atmosphere at Microsoft and to the company's engaging and invested recruiter Yin Lu.
“She knows who everyone is, is actually interested in the students she works with, and is really great about setting students up to talk to people who will be helpful and who will have insight into the specific problems or concerns a specific student has when applying for an internship or deciding among internship options,” intern Nell Elliott said.
Lu believes that Brown women have “world changers” potential, not because they're not men but because they have “such a diversity of smartness, from user experience and researching to prototyping, coding, and testing.”
Being a computer science passionate is quite rare among women, even if nowadays the tendency seems to be changing, and most of these nine women said that they were the only females in their classes, and sometimes things were far from simple.
During the internship period at Microsoft, the nine girls were united by their common passion for computers.
Intern Alex Schultz, for example, loves languages and was a classics major until she took an introductory computer science class.
Ever since, she says that language has "this inherent power because you can speak and read, but when you speak and read computer languages, you can make planes run and make Pixar movies.”
Nell Elliott's passion for computers also developed by chance, as she needed entry-level computer skills for being a math major and ended up interviewing for Google and Apple for internship.
She finally chose Microsoft because she could meet people she'd been working with in advance, and during the program she realized that she was part of the perfect team, the Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU).
People at Microsoft also captivated Tess Avitabile, as besides serious and work committed they were also quite funny and relaxed.
Avitabile also became a computer passionate after taking a class in freshman year at Brown, during which she fell in love with computers and she felt that this was what she was made for.
The nine ladies did not spend their entire internship indoors, facing a computer screen, as they had the time and opportunity to go hiking, barbecuing, biking or to simply hang out.
Overall, all nine of them agree that the time spent at Redmond was a real confidence booster and allowed them to see more clearly what they wanted to do in the future.