Codess 2020 (Microsoft) — How this help me in securing my first Internship

Himanshi Goyal
3 min readJan 27, 2021

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So here I will talk about how I got internship at Microsoft with help of Codess 2020 program.

What is Codess ?

CODESS is a community for female coders initiated by Microsoft and was established to explore ways to promote gender diversity in the engineering field.

Eligibility Criteria:

  • All the 2nd Year Female students in the 4th year Undergraduate program, from any discipline are eligible for this program.
  • All the 3rd Year Female students in the 5 Year Dual Degree program, from any discipline are eligible for this program.

Codess Program:

Step -1 : Registration

So in February they release the notification about registration. So everyone was required to register. Around 24 colleges were eligible for registration.

Step -2 : Online MCQ Test

Afterward a 20 MCQ test was arranged based on Data Structure and Algorithm (Mostly Algorithm) on 1st of March 2020.

Now after this test the students were shortlisted in 2 categories-

  1. For Ideathon
  2. For Mentorship

Let us first talk about the Ideathon category.

Step -3 : Online Coding Round and Virtual Ideathon

Since due to the COVID-19 situation the event was held virtual. So firstly we had a Microsoft teams call briefing us about how event will look like this year.

After this we have a 2 hour online coding round consisting of 4 questions. This test was auto proctoring.

After this next we have virtual Ideathon 2020. For this they divided people among groups of 6–7 people all from different colleges. There were 20+ teams.

Ideathon:

In this every team was assigned a mentor. This all happen on Microsoft Teams call. Since this was happening virtually so first some time was given for introduction among member followed by a briefing from mentor. Then with the help of group discussion we need to make a document for our Ideathon submission. There were around 7 themes to choose from. The last half hour was reserved for presentation and Q/A by mentor.

This was the most awesome stage as you get to interact with many tech enthusiastic people.

On the basis of performance in Online Coding Test and Ideathon students were shortlisted for interview for internship. Even if you are not selected worry not you would be included in the mentorship category mentioned above. This is a Win-Win situation for everyone.

Step -4 : Interview

After the above step shortlisted students got a call from Microsoft to discuss about the interview timing. After the interview you can get the opportunity of 2 month internship at Microsoft.

You can get to know everything about the Mentorship Program here:

But I would love to tell you about some perks of being in Mentorship Program:

  1. Get mentored by Microsoft seniors.
  2. Interact with many tech enthusiasts.
  3. Get hands-on some project.
  4. When Microsoft will visit your campus for onsite recruitment then you guys will get a chance for interview directly.

So as the ending note I would like to tell you if you are eligible for this do give it a shot, it is an amazing journey with lot of surprises waiting for you.

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Himanshi Goyal
Himanshi Goyal

Written by Himanshi Goyal

Software Engineer at Microsoft.

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