Melon pan from Maido in Narberth, PA. They make tasty okonomiyaki too.

University of Pennsylvania is a great school, ivy league. Unfortunately that carries a price tag — I’d expect to pay around $60,000 for a year or two there to finish a degree. Lehigh University is pricey as well, and while they have a beautiful campus, there’s nothing special about their CS program to entice me to pay the premium.

University of Delaware has a small program, and they’re expensive for out-of-state students like myself. However, they offered a full tuition waiver, guaranteed only for the first year. I might be able to finish the degree there for free. They’re really trying to push me into it — long letters, contact from Drexel alumni that moved to Delaware, and e-mails from professors looking forward to working with me.

Drexel University, where I’m about to finish my BS, also accepted me again as a graduate student. They offered a fellowship worth about $12,000 towards my tuition if I stay. I would spend about $25,000 earning the degree there over a year and a half or two.

My top choice is Penn, but I can’t justify the premium, not when I haven’t finished paying for the last 5 years in school. Lehigh’s out for the same reason. That leaves Delaware, with the cheap or free degree, and Drexel, whose CS program isn’t well known. I’m leaning towards Drexel for a few reasons — Delaware wants to push me into a Ph.D. program I don’t know I want, and I don’t like that; they’re in Newark, Delaware, which isn’t an area I want to move to, so I’d be looking at commuting; and I already know and like the professors at Drexel.

Villanova has yet to reply to my application, but everyone else wants to hear back from me soon, so I don’t plan to wait on them. Any opinions before I officially cast my vote?

With the threat of a $20,000 tax increase if I didn’t have receipts for a questioned expense no longer looming over my head, I decided it was about time I figure out where I stand for this year financially. I always have a gut feeling whether I’m on track or not, but there are just so many transactions going through my accounts both ways that I have to sit down for a few hours to figure out how any period of time went overall. I did that tonight with the help of QuickBooks and lots of printing of statements.

If I believe what I see, I’ve already made more in the first 6 months of this year than all of 2006. While there’s a noticeable drop between March and April when a record number of chargebacks ate up several thousand dollars, overall I’ve reached 6-figure revenue earlier into the year than last, and spent less per month on advertising despite that.

The sad thing is it’s going to take me a much longer time to figure out where the extra revenue is coming from (higher sales volume obviously, but why are there more sales?), why my expenses are down, and where the profit has gone, as I can only account for about a third of it making it into savings. I’m sure everything is accounted for, as it always has been when I’ve gone back and balanced accounts to check, but the fact that right now I haven’t a clue, shows how much I need both an accountant and better tracking of ROI on my advertising.

That brings me back to one of the projects I’ve wanted to start for well over a year now, which is replacing my broken AdWatcher install with my own ad tracking system. On top of saving $240 per year I’m paying for software that botched itself during an upgrade, it’ll be a lot of fun, and being involved in it like I was with W3Counter will give me tons more insight into the ROI of my currently-almost-unmanaged advertising spend.

P.S. I forgot to explain the “unofficially” part. My examiner is closing the case, but I won’t get official notification until it’s approved by a manager some time in the next few weeks.

In Philadelphia, my blackened windows (from the accumulation of truck exhaust) overlook traffic on pothole-filled roadways of drivers barely missing eachother to get from one all-concrete part of the city to another. Here, I can look out the window and see a stream that runs to Lake Washington around the corner, and drive around Lake Sammamish on the way to the office each day. I can deal with the morning drizzle every other day for that. Even if I stay in Pennsylvania after I graduate, it won’t be in Philadelphia.

Getting Acquainted

My first day and a half was spent at New Employee Orientation. Those are held every single week; there were about 80 people in the group with me. Microsoft has been on a hiring spree for the past two years, picking up about 16,000 employees last year as it grew to nearly 80,000 in total. Orientation was a bore — a lot of CYA stuff for Microsoft — things like document retention policies, when to consult the legal department, what the org structure looks like, etc. I won’t go into details on NEO since it’s a bore. There were two hours covering health benefits and stock options I don’t get — the only difference between intern and FTE — during which I hopped on an MS shuttle to the company store. Everything there is heavily discounted for employees. Vista Ultimate would cost me $35 instead of $275, and Xbox 360 games just $10, for example. I’ll take advantage of that soon.

On the second day I made my way from the main corporate campus in Redmond to where I’ll be working in Issaquah, what they call the Sammamish campus since it’s next to Lake Sammamish. It’s an extra 10 minute drive compared to going to Redmond but traffic isn’t too bad and the scenery is nice. Compared to the commute I’d have from Philadelphia to Malvern for Siemens or Unisys or a lot of the big Drexel hirers out there, it’s nothing.

I got a quick tour of the building — just a few floors tall with lots of open spaces and open doors — Microsoft tries to promote open collaboration and a college campus feel. I met my immediate boss, his boss, the developers I’d be working with, and the very energetic female “admin” who apparently makes the real decisions for the department as well as providing free candy and a massage chair to anyone that wants the room. Speaking of free food — what we’ve all heard is true — there are big cases of free soda on every floor of every building. Developers really do live on Mountain Dew.

The New Day to Day

My official position is Application Developer for the Account Planning team, part of the Enterprise People & Groups division, which in the big picture is part of Microsoft IT. I’m not working on Windows or Office or XBOX so you won’t see the software I build on your desktop, but several thousand Microsoft employees will. It’s a small team, with my boss across the hall, one of the few other developers in the same office as me, and the program manager right around the corner.

One of the first things I asked my boss about was what hours everyone was putting in. It’s a salaried job, so there is no clocking in or time sheets to fill out, but most people work roughly 9-5. Supposedly, if I can get my job done in 20 hours, I can work 20 hours a week. If I can get it done working from 3PM to 11PM every day, I can work those hours. If I want to work from home, I can head over to Redmond and get a smart card and card reader for a laptop to connect to the corporate network from anywhere. I have a “blue badge” which provides 24 hour access to all buildings in Washington, with other colors given to vendors and partners and other types of employees with restricted access, so my office is always open to me.

There are very few desktops around that aren’t running servers of some sort — development sandboxes, test servers, pre-production environments, etc. Most of the people here are developers, and developers get laptops. They’re pretty beefy Toshiba Tecra tablet PCs with more than enough memory to compile large apps on. Even with all the collaboration tools Microsoft makes, there are constantly people walking down halls with running laptops in hand and bringing them into meetings. Along with the laptop, there’s a docking station, 17″ LCD and Microsoft Laser Desktop 6000 wireless keyboard and mouse. Not as fancy as the Wireless Entertainment Desktop 7000 I have at home, but probably a better keyboard to use for coding anyway. With the laptop docked I spread my desktop across the two screens. This is already a much better environment for this kind of work than DuPont or Math Forum provided.

There’s no micromanagement here. I’ve had one-on-one meetings with a couple levels of managers up from me already and all of them say the same thing. They don’t micromanage, they just get projects going, set milestones, and expect employees to meet them. Nobody tells me what to do each day and rarely does my boss come in to see what I’m doing.

There’s more information than I could ever need available. Everyone’s doors are open, literally, so I have no problem talking to the right person for some guidance or advice. Beyond that I’ve got all of MSDN, tons of online training, classes I can register for, and a huge physical library of paper books I can borrow.

Microsoft Immersion

Why did I take this job? why did I choose to go through all the hassle of moving to Washington for half a year instead of taking a nice management job at DuPont just minutes from my apartment in Philadelphia? Aside from the coolness factor of working for a recognizable name, it was the only route I could find to getting experience in the Microsoft environment.

Drexel University helps students find jobs to fulfill coop requirements by finding employers willing to hire students for 6 month periods and listing the available jobs in a database. When I searched through there each year, three times now, there were at least 20 positions for .NET developers of some flavor. All these positions required previous experience with Windows servers, Visual Studio, some .NET language and usually Microsoft SQL Server. While I’m confident I have enough experience to pick up any of these technologies quickly and become productive in just a day or two, I’ll never get an interview for those jobs without any of the experience showing on my resume.

Microsoft came to the rescue. They sent recruiters to Drexel looking for experienced programmers but they weren’t looking specifically for experience with their technology. They were the first company I ran into developing in the Windows environment that saw my resume and gave me an interview. Those of course went well, since I’m here now, and I’m getting what I wanted. I’m being completely immersed in the Microsoft environment.

• I’m running Windows Vista Enterprise.
• I’m developing C# .NET code in Visual Studio 2005.
• I installed that with Vista’s ability to install programs over the network where every Microsoft product is available to me over the intranet.
• Every intranet website knows who I am thanks to Active Directory. I check my mail with Outlook which shows me the calendar and Communicator status of every person I come in contact with.
• Quick team chats are held with Office Communicator which also links up with IT’s bridges to AIM, Messenger and Yahoo!’s chat networks.
• I connect to Windows 2003 servers with Windows Remote Desktop.
• Before I started, I was given directions to the office with a link to Live.com Maps.
• Team documents are shared on a Sharepoint server.
• I access my e-mail from home with Exchange 2007′s Outlook Web Access web client.
• I have access to all of Microsoft’s current beta software — employees use beta software for real world testing before release.
• I’m an administrator for two Microsoft SQL Server instances and a Microsoft Dynamics CRM instance.
• I made modifications to a program written on top of Microsoft Office Groove.
• My default search engine is Live.com.

If that weren’t enough, I figured this was a good time to replace my old Creative Zen Xtra mp3 player with a Microsoft Zune. I like to load it with episodes of Battlestar Galactica to watch in one of the 26 cafeterias here. I’ve joined “The Social” – I can see the other Zune owners in the building with wifi enabled and what they’re listening to.

It’s a good thing

I’m having a good time. I like my job. I’m driving somewhere new pretty much every day. My mailbox is filled with messages from all the groups I’ve joined already — from Zune owners to Warcraft players to keeping in touch with the other interns and alumni from Drexel. I think this will be a very good 6 months.