MS SDE Intern: Day 1

MSR and MBA interns were checked in before Uni interns: as the latter is the greatest in number. I was tensed more than usual all the time. On my table in the auditorium (?) was two MIT's: a boy and a girl; the boy was a math major, he expressed his interest in ml and computer vision. There was a apparently very confident guy doing internship at MS the second time. It was a huge arrangement - the orientation. There are connector taxis for going between buildings, the campus is big. My manager and mentor are Chinese, the mentor is working at MS for 12 years and before that he used to work in MSR in Beijing; to him development is more real and thus more interesting than MSR's "ideas." I had to set up my PC. I did not get the email account because of some delayed submission of some required info. My mentor tried to help me get my table higher up as it was a bit too low, but I said it was OK, because I could lower my chair; it might not have been a good idea to resist his help. My manager tried to give a over all idea of what the team works: it is too vague so far for me to come up with good questions and I did not even realize what is the source of complexity that he emphasized. All I understood is, there are a lot of components in the reliable and available distributed system and there is no good way to monitor or reason about all the components of the state-full machine; I need to come up with some plan in unison with my mentor. My mentor is probably the main guy for load balancing, hence he lacks enough time to delve deep into this issue of complexity. My manager said, I need to set up goals within first weeks; I think they call it "commitments." Overall, I had the feeling that I am going to be a (albeit tiny) part of something big. I met Aran (?) from Harvard; he is very young, not yet determined if his major would be in math, cs, or biology. He is going to be on our team. My mentor seems a helpful guy. I do not remember his or my manager's names!