Today, I am excited to share the Microsoft internship journey of Sarah Ferrolino, a 5th year computer science student from Ryerson University. For those who are familiar with my work, you’ll find that I love sharing inspiration from people who are well experienced and have a plethora of accomplishments under their belt.
However, I am equally inspired by those who are early-in-career and don’t let their age get in the way of their impact. Sarah comes from a technical background in the software developer space, but was interested in understanding what business impact meant. This led her to apply for an internship with the Business & Sales Operations team at Microsoft Canada (fun fact: this was my first team), where she got to support sellers in driving customer success.
Fortunately, Sarah had a great manager who gave her lots of opportunities to shadow other people across the organization and understand how different processes drove the business. This gave her a chance to learn about the world of sales operations support while also taking on passion projects on the side.
Sarah started her internship during the pandemic, and was inspired by a one-pager that her predecessor had put together for her onboarding. Reaching out to other interns in her department, Sarah pitched her idea for an onboarding app that would ease the start of the internship experience. Soon after, a project team (Jen Crocker, Crystal Cao, Andrew Wong and Komal Gulati) came together to meet bi-weekly and brainstorm how they would create a central landing portal.
Meanwhile, Sarah also set a goal to earn a Microsoft certification every month. When she took the Power Platform Fundamentals (PL-900) exam and learned about a low-code no-code environment, she decided to explore it further and learn some of the basic functionalities and drag-and-drop features.
With the user-friendly interface, Sarah and her teammates developed an Onboarding PowerApp which helped newcomers learn about the organization and discover important tools and resources to succeed in their day-to-day roles.
Impressed by this initiative, Sarah’s managers pushed her to present her solution to the entire department! Check out some screenshots below.
P.S. Having seen the onboarding app myself, I can definitely confirm that this would be a useful tool for any new employee to the department 👏
Key Takeaways
- You can make an impact on your team or company no matter how early-in-career you are
- Take the initiative to learn new tools and platforms and apply them to real challenges
- Be curious and explore different areas (e.g. technical vs. business) of the organization
Thank you Sarah for sharing your cool project with me and if you’re a student, please stay tuned for her tips on applying for Microsoft internships!
My personal philosophy is growing 1% everyday through finding inspiration to share with the world.
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