First, I attended a Microsoft interest meeting at my college. I learned about the program and handed them my resume at the end of the presentation. About a week later, they emailed me, stating they would like to interview me over the phone.

The phone interview lasted around 30 minutes and felt more like a friendly conversation than an intimidating interview. The representative asked me questions like:

• What's your favorite piece of software or hardware, and why?
• Explain to me how a computer works.
• How would you test a water bottle?
• How do you stay up to date with new technology?
• Tell me about a coding project that you have worked on.

After feeling it went well, I received another email about a week later, informing me that they would like to fly me out to their main Redmond campus in Seattle, WA. They paid for the flight, a two-night stay at the Westin, and for any other expenses like food and taxi travel.

When I arrived, there was a dinner social where I got to meet other candidates and previous Explorer interns who now work at Microsoft full-time. The next day, we were bussed out to the campus and ate lunch in their massive food court. Then it was time for the interviews.

There were three interviews: one more software development-oriented, one more PM-focused, and one more development and testing-oriented. The interviews were extremely laid-back. The interviewers were just trying to find out if you were a good fit at Microsoft, and you were not competing with other candidates. If you could just have a conversation with the interviewers, you would be fine.

There were three whiteboard coding questions. One was to sort an array of integers. Another was to combine and sort two arrays into a single, bigger array.

Be sure to have a coding project to talk about, whether it's something you did at a previous internship or a personal coding project. You need to show them that you are extremely interested in technology.

I received an email at the end of the same week saying that I got the position. Overall, it was an amazing experience, and even if I didn't get the internship position, I still learned a lot on my short trip to Microsoft.

You have a sorted array A with length m and a sorted array B with length n. Insert array elements in order into an array C with length m+n.