Weekend for me began on Thursday,28th April 2011, as I travelled to Hyderabad for an event organised by Microsoft called “New Hires Day”. It was a get-together for all FTE’s (Full Time Employees) who would be starting their respective careers at Microsoft this year. I was excited as it was my first trip by air – and it was fully sponsored by Microsoft!!!
I and two of my classmates took flight from Mumbai to Hyderabad. There, we were taken to Serenity Inn. There we were given a T-shirt 🙂 which we were supposed to wear the next day. There were students from different parts of the country. It was great interacting with them. We were informed of the schedule for the next day, which started early in the morning. Even so, we stayed up till late night, and enjoyed a few games of snooker (-the first time I tried my hand at the game).
We reached the Microsoft campus at around 9 am the next day. We had an ice-breaker session, which meant that we played on the Kinect 🙂 with the others (again, my first time). It was a good session, and after 20 minutes of playing, each one had interacted with almost everyone else. Then the actual event began, which involved presentations from various leaders. It wasn’t boring at all (a complete surprise, because I had expected them to be a real drag), and we had almost as much fun as we had playing on Kinect. The leaders were ‘cool’- there’s no other way I can describe them. The day carried on with interactions with Microsoft employees, lunch, Kinect, some more Kinect, interaction with seniors, more Kinect, and a campus tour. The campus was huge, and we were finally taken to the Visitor’s centre, where models of each of Microsoft’s products, especially the high technology ones such as Kinect, Surface, Windows phone etc were kept. After spending some time roaming around, it was time for some D.J. We all danced a lot (even me, and I’m not one who likes to dance) and had dinner. This ended the first day at Microsoft.
The next day, Microsoft had arranged for us to be taken to Rush Sports, which was an indoor sports club. We enjoyed some real bowling (after the virtual bowling on Kinect, man we had too much of Kinect, didn’t we?) followed by pool and other stuff. And in between all of this, we managed to take quite some photos and make some new friends. Who says that transition from college life to a professional life can’t be fun?
Mindful 