Series 4: From Student to Teacher
“Ten years sharpening a sword, the frost edge never tried” — Internship, entering society, and the first project
Internships are our first window into society. Now the school has a well-established internship office and partnerships with enterprises, so students have worry-free internships. Let’s look at our situation back then. In 2003, less than a year after we joined the school, companies came recruiting interns. Our biggest problem was confidence — without precedents, we didn’t know what we could do or what we were worth. We had to figure it out ourselves.
The first company to recruit interns at the school was a obscure little company called Ketou Tongji. No reputation, no salary. Today, they’d probably get zero applicants. But back then, it attracted resumes from over half our class. Teacher Wan said we were undervaluing ourselves (we truly didn’t know our worth) and stopped us from submitting more, otherwise it might have become a school-wide运动. Later, most companies recruiting interns were small-to-medium ones like Fudan Kingstar, Primeton, etc. Fortune 500 companies were rare. To make matters worse, during our internship year, SARS was raging, and there was even an incident where all interns were collectively sent back by their companies. So most of our cohort’s elite ended up interning and working at中小 companies. Of course, gold shines anywhere — my classmates have all done excellently in their positions. Now many large companies recruit interns at the school. The reputation and trust large enterprises have in our students were built bit by bit by previous cohorts. Current students should cherish this hard-earned opportunity.
As for me, I was fortunate to intern at Microsoft Global Technology Center. Microsoft back then was very different. They hadn’t yet discovered China’s cheap labor, so there was no Microsoft R&D group遍布 China. Shanghai’s only Microsoft branch was the Global Technology Center in Xujiahui. Their intern筛选 was very strict — I recall only three interns in the entire center: one from Fudan, one from Jiaotong, and me (who got incredibly lucky).
The Global Technology Center was essentially Microsoft’s after-sales service. Customers who bought Microsoft products and didn’t know how to use them would call. All kinds of strange questions. So my first internship was answering strange questions. Fortunately, I was assigned to the developer support division, so the questions were software development related — not about how to use Excel for balance sheets. Later, the support center got an internal project building an MVP (Most Valuable Professional) website, and I moved to testing. Although I was just a tester, I got to learn about a project’s development流程. Microsoft has its own unique project management methods, different from textbooks. This experience taught me that going through a complete software engineering process in a real project is a hundred times better than reading software engineering books.
My initial internship contract with Microsoft was three months, but I stayed nearly a year. In that year, I earned my first salary from hard work; experienced the daily commute squeezing onto buses; made my first customer calls; and learned that what employees care about most over coffee is housing prices… Until one day Teacher Wan called, saying the school had an automotive electronics project in collaboration with the Automotive School that needed people. I ended my internship at Microsoft and returned to school. It was March 2004.
The Automotive School had received a Shanghai Science Commission project to build an in-vehicle information system. They couldn’t handle the software part, so they sought collaboration with the Software School. The OS was Windows CE. That day, I met Teacher Wang Dongqing, who had just joined the school. It was also my first接触 with Windows CE and embedded development. This project profoundly shaped my path into embedded development.
Initial development was very rough. We didn’t even understand some basic concepts of embedded systems. We had to摸索 slowly. The road was exceptionally difficult — Windows CE was just starting in China, with very few resources available. The project team of several people gathered and searched through the scarce materials together. Whenever someone made even a small breakthrough, they’d immediately share with others. It was during this time that I first thought about writing a Windows CE textbook. Later, after graduation, I lost my housing, but the project wasn’t finished. Several of us squeezed into a临时 found small house and continued the project. During the most intense period, I coded until late at night, then fell asleep with my head on the keyboard. During development, I met Wan Gang (not yet president at the time) a few times. We finally got through the mid-term review, earning praise from the Automotive School, leading to后续 work that continues to this day.