Intern Puzzle Day
culture  

Intern Puzzle Day

By Sakthi Vetrivel

Every summer at Microsoft, the full-time employees put on this event for the interns called Puzzle Day. Often advertised as the most fun an intern can have indoors on a Saturday morning at Microsoft, Puzzle Day is where interns form teams of ten to twelve and then race to solve puzzles in order to solve a meta-puzzle (a puzzle made up of the answers from the other puzzles).

Teams rangeanywhere from the super committed groups that hold tryouts and practices to the incredibly lax that are just there for the free pizza and shirts. And if you win, you get free swag! The theme this year was “We’re Going to Mars!”, so all of our shirts were parodies of the NASA logo and the presentation was filled with space puns. And of course, the puzzles were all space themed.

AyaanaPatel Sikora ‘18 and Kelsi Riley ‘19 excited to start their day of puzzling.

We arrived at around 10 AM, with the competition starting at 10:30 AM, met up with our team, and ventured over to our designated conference room, a packet of puzzles in hand. And in that conference room we stayed until six, yelling in frustration, chuckling over desperate attempts to solve these puzzles, raiding Microsoft’s fridges for free drinks, and occasionally, cheering in triumph.

There were a few puzzles that required anagram solving, one that we had to stick in the freezer, one we cut into pieces of a puzzle and then translated the resulting shapes into braille to get a clue for the final answer. Each puzzle had so many different layers that it required a lot of teamwork to finish each one. Our team was exceptionally small, with seven total members, but we still managed to not do too terribly, ranking at around 50th place out of one hundred or so teams. And while we weren’t even close to winning, I still had a lot of fun seeing my friends from college again and making new intern friends. And it definitely inspired me to create some cool puzzles for my Ditch Day stack a few years down the road.

Cheers, Sakthi Vetrivel

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