Greetings everyone from Microsoft Açık Akademi Summer School 2015 🙂 The summer school I’d been waiting for — along with my internship at Microsoft — has officially started. Our regular start time was 09:00, but for the beauty of day one I set foot in the Microsoft Türkiye office at 07:30. By the way, it had been a long time since I’d kicked things off with the very first metro of the day. I caught the first train at 6 in the morning, and I’d never seen the metro this empty. A scene straight out of The Matrix played in my head on the ride 😀
Once I got to the office, the first thing I did was meet up with the friends I’d known for six months through the MSP program; as the others slowly started arriving, we grabbed our orange t-shirts and colorful wristbands and all turned the same shade of orange. It made for a beautiful sight 🙂
On our first day, Audience Marketing Manager Behice Funda and Microsoft Türkiye Deputy GM Cavit Yantaç opened the program with their talks. Murat Kansu, who is becoming Microsoft Türkiye’s General Manager starting September 1, gave a special opening-day speech.
After a short break, Kerem Özsü — who would spend a long stretch of the day with us — shared his knowledge on topics like software architecture and project management. During the break, we got the chance to sit down with our pre-arranged groups at the lunch tables and meet each other.
After the final break came the part of the day I couldn’t quite believe: the project pitches. I’d like to think I’ve finally beat my stage fright in this kind of setting, since this was my third time speaking in front of such a big crowd. To be honest, there was still a little nervousness 😀
Since there were close to 100 of us, I didn’t want to be left for last and decided to get my pitch over with early — I was among the first to present. The day wrapped up with nearly 50 people having presented.
Finally, on the way out, we MSPs hit up a spot in Beşiktaş in half-asleep, half-wandering mode and let the day’s tiredness wash off. I made it home around 22:30. Even though there were 16 hours between leaving and returning home, it was a great day from my point of view. I’m eagerly waiting for the rest of the days. Stay tuned.
