Microsoft sponsored an event on campus, the MSFT3C or Microsoft College Coding Challenge, Tuesday evening in Engineering Building II. One hundred and twenty five students in teams of one to three were involved in coding real-world situations and won prizes such as cash, shirts, tablets and the opportunity to get noticed by Microsoft.
Microsoft organized the event to engage students with opportunities to code and do puzzles outside the classroom, according to Josephine Mooney, a Microsoft recruiter.
“This was a fun way to promote pursuing computer science principles and knowledge outside of the classroom and also gives them an opportunity to work side-by-side with their friends and interact with our company in a fun way with prizes,” Mooney said.
Microsoft is piloting the coding challenge at NC State in the U.S. and is planning to move to other institutions as well. The program has previously toured in Australia.
Team Velociraptors, Nathan Shirley and Sean Kramer, both juniors in computer science, won first place and walked away with $100 AMEX gift cards each. The rest of the participants were raffled shirts and a Dell Venue Pro tablet. After the event, many participants gave their resumes to the recruiters.
“We try to hire as many as possible every year,” Mooney said. Seven students from NC State interned at Microsoft this summer, and Mooney said she intended to bring even more students to the major software company.
Students had nothing but good things to say about the competition.
Jean-Claude Shore, a freshman in engineering, said he learned a lot about coding and that he found it rewarding to try and solve the difficult problems.
“I had an idea of how I would go about solving them,” Shore said. “I was thinking about how I would organize and go about solving them, but I wasn’t able to do it in the two hour time limit.”
Some of the different problems they worked on included writing a code to designate that the people most genetically susceptible to a mutating virus get vaccinated first or developing a code for an electronic vending machine.
Anand Vijayaraghavan, a graduate student studying computer science, said he attended the Microsoft challenge to see new problems.
“I really enjoy looking at new problems, keep my mind [active] all the time that’s why I came here,” Vijayaraghavan said. “I didn’t answer a lot of questions, but I think I gained a little knowledge. I did enjoy the overall experience here, meeting people and talking with them. People should organize more events like these more frequently.”
Abidaan Nagawkar, computer science graduate student, said he was happy for the educational experience.
“I felt it was pretty good; there were problems of various difficulty levels, so some things I felt I could do if I worked a little harder, some of the things were a bit difficult for me, but maybe not for someone who has more experience or skill,” Nagawkar said. “I think it tested a wide variety of skill sets.”
Stephen Worley, a sophomore in computer science, said he attended to see if he could get an internship or co-op at Microsoft and to network.
“I kind of learned that when it comes to computer science and programing it’s a team thing; most of these people were helping each other and working with each other,” Worley said. “It was more of a team setting than an individual thing like I expected.”
