Different horizon

Hi guys,

I'm Ram Anand again.

I've described in my first post about the first two days of my work at Microsoft Singapore. Now, it has just dawned upon me after reading the other posts, that I'm in a quite different horizon in terms of work scope in comparison with other interns (I'm not sure if this is a good or a bad thing).

I have not done newspaper cuttings, nor have I made phone calls, arrange tags for events like other interns have described in their event experiences. Speaking about events, last Friday we had a party called the 'Microsoft Media Christmas Party'. It was more of an informal event held at a bar, and everyone seems to be having a blast. It was however attended by the real who and whos of upper echleons in the MS structure (Asia Pacific region) and also journalists from all over the place (such as BBC Asia, CIO Asia). It wouldn't be an understatement to say I was really intimidated by the very presence of such individuals (I even took a picture with who used to be Microsoft's global PR manager, phew). What I expected intitially is to stand at the door and receive our guests as they arrive, delivering their ID tags for the event, so forth and so on. However, MS Singapore has an agency called Edelman working with them in managing events. Thus, I was spared from all this logistics of arranging this event. I have to mention here that their system of working too shocked me. I can live with having a checklist and giving name tags to journalists as they come in as per the checklist. However, what I witnessed here is that Edelman basically recognizes each journalist as they come walking by metres away and immediately give them their name tags. The checklist is to just mark it off, not to refer names. Not only the journalists, but also MS staff were recognized immediately with their positions by Edelman. Altogether, on that day, there were nearly 100 people in the party and Edelman recognized every single person who came without asking 'who?' (I was left wondering how many phone calls and groundwork it would have taken to recognize all of them within such instance) In short, EVERYBODY knows EVERYBODY.

p.s Does this work the same way for events by other interns?

So what I did was to arrange the goody bags that we gave away for each journalist, and sang a Christmas carol along with the Microsoft's Asia Pacific PR team to begin the day (we looked the journalists straight in the eyes and sang 'all we want for Christmas is News, GOOD NEWS'). After that, I took some pictures for the event, and had a conversation with few MS people and journalists (most of the time, I was just listening, I was just so out-of-place when the 30 year olds and 40 year olds of the corporate world are talking about their kids' technological interests, what the world would look like in 5-10 years with technology, the new Windows Home Server, the flight simulator at MS world HQ at Redmond, Washington, their Hawaiian holidays, their business trips to Europe, etc.)

I'm currently working on byline piece reserved for MS in the next edition of a business magazine targeted at NGOs. I'm writing a piece about the MS' social work in Singapore and their inittiatives in helping the physically disabled.

To add further, what I did for the most of my first week is to read, read, read, read and read about MS. In order to able to work and brainstorm for upcoming web campaigns alongside my manager, I have to to know about everything there is to be discovered about MS (not in terms of history, but their porducts, from Zune to XBox, to forthcoming technologies such as cloud computing, digital rights management, PHP webbing system, Open Office, inter-operability initiatives, competitions with Google, Linux, IBM, and Apple). I could very well return a computer geek after two months. (:

So, thats about it so far from me.

Good luck for all the other interns.

Regards,

Ram Anand