I usually do not write diaries. Since this is probably the best two days of my life, I thought to pen it down.
24th September 2012: A great day for me. Hired by Microsoft, India.

I traveled to Hyderabad to attend an event organized by Microsoft, called the New Hire’s Day on 8-9th march 2013. I with my friend Abhinav boarded flight on 7th march from Bhubaneswar. We were more excited as this was our first trip by air and that too fully sponsored by MS. We were warm welcomed on the Hyderabad airport. We were taken to the Re:gen:ta One(Five star hotel). We were the first one to arrive Hyderabad(7th afternoon). So we kept on exploring the hotel room. The hotel was awesome and it had everything you can think of. The only thing it missed that there was no lock in the bathroom. 😛 Anyways, i enjoyed a lot. I have attached few pictures of the hotel.

People started landing from different parts of the country right from the 7th evening. We interacted with few of them. I met my roomie Akshit Khurana, a very cool guy. Each of us received packages in the hotel itself which included a MS T-shirt and schedule of the event to be held in the next two days. The great thing was that color of the T-shirt represented team so that we could find it easy to interact with members of same team. We were supposed to wear the T-shirts on the next day.

The main event started on 8th morning. We were taken to the MS campus at 8:30 AM. We got NHD I-cards which was representing a random team name (This had nothing to do with our actual teams). The event started with some talks(as of our surprise, it was not boring, we enjoyed it fully) from great leaders regarding careers @Microsoft and how they did it, followed by a tea break. Then, we had an ice-breaker session. This was a kind of intro program so that we could mingle with each other in our team and know the team and its product better. We had great fun together. Everyone was interactive. MS is full of smart people where you get a chance to learn from everyone. We learned about the products more closely we would be working on. We also played some games together. Few of us got goodies too. Within half an hour, the environment melted and we had interacted with most of us. The session ended on 1:00 PM.
At about 2:30 PM, academia session started. They told us how MS is organizing varieties of events like http://Code.Fun.Do in different colleges to pick up the talented people apart from campus hires. There was a discussion on how they could improve such programs and events.

One of the best things in MS is that the working life is very flexible here. You can come at any time and leave at any time. There are many exciting things in the campus which won’t make you feel bored and which make it a wonderful place to work. We(I and Abhinav) played Kinect(first time) where your physical activities are synchronized with the game. It was an amazing experience.
There was a photo session where we had a lot of pictures(by MS of course). I will attach it once they upload it.

Real fun begins.
The main fun began at about 5:00 PM. We were clustered in the hall for group photo session where the environment suddenly became noisy and some of the previous year hires started dancing. Then everyone went mad and each of us jumped onto the dance floor to rock on. We danced a lot. We also got chance to visit the MS campus. Guys I must say the campus is beautiful and amazing. One eye catcher is that you will find road running from the 7th floor of the building. Then 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. There were some small games. People got chocolates for winning it. The food was great. This ended the first day at Microsoft.

The next day was something challenging for us. We were told to group together with team name as indicated in our NHD I-cards. We faced Engineering Challenge. We were given some stuff and we had to make a mechanical structure. The major challenge was that they told us to do it in steps. Design. Implement. Test. The main objective was to make us learn how to work in a team while having fun. We had a lot of fun together. Special thanks to Richa Bansal, Aarif Jindani, Manish Kumar, Saurabh Agarwal, Ritu Lakhotia, Amritha Raghunath, Prateek Agarwal , Naresh Kumar and Harshit Pahuja. It was almost done, we just missed something. It was really fun interacting with you guys. Cheers. 🙂 🙂

The one thing which makes MS an amazing place is that nobody cares how you look and what is your background. The only thing which they care is work hard and party harder.

All good things come to an end..
They were right. After the NHD, you will keep on counting the days of your joining. Great food. Free cold drinks. Beautiful and amazing campus. Smart and innovative people. Diverse culture. Everything just blew away my mind.