Two Months at Microsoft: Learning to Read the Room
Two months in, I am done with a third of my internship at Microsoft. In this time, I’ve been forced to rethink what impact, ambition, and clarity truly look like when trying to grow inside a company operating at an immense scale.
From the outside, scale is easy to describe. You can look at revenue, head count and market cap and say "oh thats a big company." But inside it, the scale feels physical. You can feel it in the number of moving parts, the number of people involved in making anything happen, and the sheer speed at which everything keeps changing anyway. Having worked at Heineken before, I did not walk in naive, but the difference was palpable.
It's one thing to know a company is huge but it's a whole another, to feel how small you are inside of it.
The first couple of weeks were of course overwhelming (af). I came in with a familiar instinct to move fast, create impact, and prove value early. But that instinct quickly fell short. How could I ask how to make impact before understanding what the available doors I could walk through, even were? Where did decisions happen? Where were the gaps? What does this role actually look like in practice?
So a lot of my first month was just conversations and coffee chats with people both in my team and outside of it. Partly because I like yapping but mostly because people are the clearest entry point into understanding a system this large. That first month was entirely about learning how to read the MANY rooms I now had in front of me.
One of the more (surprisingly) uncomfortable things about those early weeks was that external validation arrived earlier than internal certainty. I got strong feedback from someone really senior and my first reaction was not confidence. Ok maybe my actual first reaction was happiness, but very quickly my SECOND reaction of panic rose. Had I created an impression I have to live up to before I even started? Have I fooled people?
Intellectually I knew that wasn’t true- I try to be as authentic as possible. But imposter syndrome rarely cares about logic.
What I have noticed, here and when I was at Heineken, is that my self doubt gets loudest precisely when I am doing the most. I’ll be stretched to my limits, across multiple things at once and my brain will decide that it's the perfect moment to start stressing about the fact that I’m not really doing anything. The periods where I am handling the most are often the periods where I feel the least sure, and I find that soooooo strange ??? Someone help me out with that pls.
After my final year in my bachelor’s when I also finished up a year at Heineken at the same time, I burned out badly. I was so overcommitted that even rest felt stressful to me. I made it a goal that this time around I would be more deliberate in NOT letting that happen. So far, I’ve done that by protecting at least one social function a week, saying no more strategically, and outsourcing every small decision task I can so I don't have to free up mental space for it. I am still overwhelmed, don’t get me wrong, but I do feel a difference which is a win I am quite proud of.
I also started reading “The first 90 days” in my first week to help me prep, and the principle of it has been a great anchor. Transitions need structure and I cannot rely on vague ambition alone. One of the reasons I moved further into tech was that I kept seeing technology reshape spaces that didn’t look technical at first glance. Going from one niche example of that to now being at the source, I am increasingly drawn to the translation work around it. There are still not enough people who can explain what technical change actually means without hiding behind buzzwords. Too many people want to be near AI but only few want to do the harder work of understanding why it matters, where it matters, and what value it creates for different people. That is probably the clearest way I understand my role now.
Beyond the sale and into translation. Making technical capability legible.
Connecting product, customer need, internal alignment, and trust together. But weaving those together is messier than it looks.
In fact, some of the more interesting moments I’ve had have come from that tension. The International Women’s Day around Copilot brought light to a big problem I was not considering. If AI models are trained on biased data, then biased outcomes are built into the system. Which means that progress in AI cannot just be by building better models or increasing adoption but rather, making the world feeding those models more equal in the first place. Hearing it articulated in that context made the issue feel so much more concrete than it ever was before.
Another moment came from supporting an early access customer community in the security and governance space (NOT my forte). Watching how different internal groups have to show up as one coherent front to the customer was an interesting glimpse into how companies deliver value. The customer does not care about your individual roles. You could be technical, another person could be product facing and another- commercial. But to the customer you are ONE company. If the internal seams show, you’ve already lost some ground.
The first half of this internship has been about learning, observing, and figuring out where I fit. The second half needs to be more directional.
I want to do something visible, measurable, transferable. Something I can point to and say I built it, or I moved it forward.
Also something that can actually help me identify a landing zone for me whether at Microsoft or outside. It's time to turn curiosity into contribution. See you in another 2 months with an update on how that goes!
