One stop guide for Microsoft CODESS Program
An amazing opportunity for sophomore girl students!
About CODESS
CODESS is a community for female coders initiated by Microsoft and was established to explore ways to promote gender diversity in the engineering field.
“Science is not a boy’s game, it’s not a girl’s game. It’s everyone’s game.” — Nichelle Nichols
Many of us would find a lot of male coders excelling in tech industry but very less female coders to be inspired from. CODESS community hence aims to inspire female coders and help them achieve their professional goals. Through networking events, mentoring and sharing experiences, it offers a very good forum to women!
Eligibility Criteria:
- B.E/B. Tech 2nd year female students in 4 year Undergraduate program from any discipline
- 3rd year female students in the 5 year Dual Degree program
- M. Tech 1st year girls (across all specializations)
- 70% (or a CGPA of 7/10) in the current academic program
Program benefits and key takeaways:
- Interact with Microsoft leaders
- Meet tech-savvy people and share your passion for technology
- Participate in Idea-thon/Hackathon
- Get mentorship opportunity from Microsoft professionals
- Internship offer at Microsoft for the winners
Rounds to qualify for CODESS
Round 1: Registration
The CODESS team collaborate with the University Recruitment team which will then send the information and registration link for it to the students of their university. Registration of the CODESS program begins in the month of February and asks your personal details, GPA, why you want to be a part of CODESS etc.
Round 2: Online MCQ and Coding test
It’s a series of online MCQ and coding tests held in early March which focus on basic knowledge of Problem Solving, Data structures and Algorithms. Questions related to searching and sorting algorithms were given more focus last year in the MCQ test. Based on the performance in this test, students are shortlisted for the Idea-thon round.
Round 3: Idea-thon
It is an opportunity that will provide you to prove your passion for technology, for problem-solving and serve as the perfect intellectual simulation by challenging your mind to think.
It aims to create a platform for all the bright minds in the field of technology to network, come together and ideate with Microsoft mentors and finally come up with brilliant solutions to some real world challenges.
“All sorts of things can happen when you’re open to new ideas and playing around with things.” — Stephanie Kwolek
The Idea-thon round generally takes place at Microsoft Campus at Hyderabad and Bangalore but last year i.e. in 2020, it was held online due to Covid-19 circumstances. The duration of idea-thon round was of 4 hours and the theme was related to Sustainability!
There were 20+ teams and each team had 6–7 participants from different colleges and one Microsoft mentor was assigned per team who moderated the group discussions and helped the team reach the final solution. The ideas were showcased using a presentation of not more than 6 slides and supporting documents that would describe the architecture of the solution were required to be submitted.
Participants were marked on the basis of their ideas, technical knowledge, teamwork, creative and presentation skills.
The key to ace the Idea-thon round is to think out of the box ideas and keep in mind the feasibility and impact of your solution.
Round 4: Interviews
Those who performed well in Idea-thon round got the opportunity to interview with the Microsoft team and finally got a 2 month Internship offer from Microsoft!
But…
Those who couldn’t bag the Internship offer, got the opportunity to participate in Virtual Mentorship Program — Engage 2020 with Microsoft!
Microsoft Engage 2020 Virtual Mentorship Program
It was a 6 week program held in the month of June-July 2020 conducted in association with Ace Hacker.
Due to COVID conditions, this mentorship program was held online and hence it was called Virtual Mentorship Program.
But there was one more MCQ test which students had to take before getting into this mentorship which would give the understanding of the subjects which they have studied by then and help the Microsoft team to evaluate the potential of the students and help them succeed in the Mentorship Program.
The theme of the program was ‘Mars Colonization’ which was aimed to establish ‘a permanent human settlement on Mars’.
The mission of students was to strive to get selected as the part of the crew by taking up assignments and contribute to mission by applying AI concepts to build a web based application.
Students could participate individually or in the team of maximum 4.
There were two choices for project:
Project 1: Navigate the Mars Rover — to find the shortest path between two points while avoiding obstacles on the way.
Project 2: Entertain the crew — by using Minmax algorithm to build an unbeatable Tic Tac Toe game powered by AI.
Along with assignments and the project, a lot of webinars on latest technology trends such as Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Git and GitHub were organized. There were a lot of mentor connects, Microsoft leader addresses on various aspects of life and culture at Microsoft and Ask me Anything sessions for project related queries.
Finally after a lot of earnest efforts and hardwork, the time for project submission arrived, students were evaluated on the basis of uniqueness of solution, technical achievement, code quality and relevance to the theme of the project and were selected among the top teams for each category across India!
This was how the program came to an end! It was an enriching experience interacting with Microsoft professionals, attending those informative sessions, debugging a lot of new errors everyday :D and learning new things everyday. I would like to thank the Microsoft team for giving us such an amazing opportunity to learn and grow! It was a program worth attending!
I would recommend everyone eligible for this program to definitely give it a shot and experience this enthralling journey. So go and grab this one time opportunity and if you found this post helpful, do share it with your friends so that they can also know more about this program!
Read more about it here: https://www.codess.net/