 If you haven't learned your summer 2023 internship yet, you really need to be worried and think about something's wrong with your job hunting strategy, or maybe your resume, maybe your networking strategy, or maybe you don't have a product portfolio. But what if I tell you that even if all the companies are having layoffs and crazy things going on in the environment, you can still definitely learn summer internship if you follow the right strategies. I guarantee you, you're going to make it happen as well. Just like today, we invited our guest speaker and streamed with you the behind-the-scenes secret, how she learned the portfolio internship with Microsoft in summer 2023. Make sure to stay until the end of this video where we share with you top three must-do's so that you are able to quickly learn your next internship as soon as possible. Hey guys, this is Dr. Nancy Lee, a direct product and featured in Forbes. I've helped 100 people lend their dream PM job offer in fan companies and unicorn startups, and continue to get promoted as a product leader. If you're interested in product management course, please go to PMExcelsure.io to learn the most effective way to become a product manager. Make sure to subscribe to our channel, hit the bell button to be notified every time and turn on new video every Wednesday. If you like the tips we provide you today, please make sure to hit the like button until it turns blue because it's the only way YouTube algorithm will recognize me. And today's guest speaker we have is Iris Yuning Yi. She's sharing with you guys regarding how she was able to lend product manager internship in Microsoft. Hey, hi Iris. How are you? Hello, Nancy. Thanks for having me today. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you for joining us. And you know, lots of our audience have this question. Hey, we're going through a crazy recession. There's not that many jobs out there. I know lots of you guys just finished some kind of like some like midterms. My finally it's time for you guys really late their focus on landing your next some internship as soon as possible because time is running out. But you successfully land a great internship. Can you just quickly start introducing yourself and share all the secret behind the scenes? How you make it happen? Yeah. And first of all, thanks for having me. And I definitely feel the midterm part because I just wrapped up my meeting for two of them. And I'm Iris. I'm also a first year master's student right now. I'm currently studying in University of Michigan Information Science major. And so in the coming summer, I will be in in turning at Microsoft in the Azure Security team. Awesome. Welcome. Welcome. So by the way, congratulations on your offer. We have like so many Microsoft internship offers through PMA programming. You are one of them. Very excited for you guys. But can you tell us exactly how we get started? First, we'll tell us what's your challenges and learning a PM internship during a recession and how you conquer those challenges. Can you start with the first challenge you have? There are definitely a lot of challenges and I definitely do every single one of you. And the first challenge I had was so I started my master's degree last year in around August. So and at that time, I that was my first semester and I'm trying to figure out, okay, how to kind of do the interview about product management. And at the same time, the application and a lot of job posting is already open. So the first challenge is how to get prepared for the interview and applying at the same time. So all of these is really time consuming. And the interview is really hard. But I found PMA in August through your YouTube video. And then I was like, okay, this is somewhere I want to go to and I find community so I can learn from Nancy and also learn from other people at the same time. So this is the first challenge and how I started from the draft seeking process. I see. Can you tell us more regarding how we conquer the first challenge? Sounds like there's lots going on, especially for big companies, the internships are deadline. Like majority of the big tech company is by August and maybe until September, they still accept the application and you have lots going on. So tell us how exactly you manage it. I think first of all is just I as soon as I was on board of the PMA, I got to talk to Nancy. I got to talk to a lot of alumni and learn about the timeline. First of all, as you said, a lot of internships, they stopped accepting the applications until August or even September or July. So it's really early. So I as soon as really realized that I started to start from the very beginning of the PMA modules of the resume preparing and of those who how you can pitch to link in networking and then all of these. So start from there, get everything ready, such as resume, such as portfolio, such as your link in. So I spent about two weeks getting all of these ready and go to the office hours. And then I started applying based on all of the materials I have. And that was how I started is about the end of August, I remember, or the start of September. And after that, I did assignment ten teniously like one hour each day to look through the jobs and one hour to look through the courses provided by the PMA. So I learned about the interview, how it's going and how to kind of do a product framework. So do it all together at the same day and keep doing it for about two weeks. And then when I got the first interview, I kind of can apply the framework into it. And so where the interview and where the PMA courses, these two coming together, I think it's a practice process for me. And this altogether comes to how I conquered the first challenge, how to manage them all together at the same time. Iris, so tell us, given all the challenges you had, so how many interviews you actually had through those very busy application studying process. So I probably landed about 10, but I failed most of them, especially the first one that hurts a lot. I failed the first doling, that was with Dolling Go, I failed that interview. And that took me quite a time to kind of recover and think through that. Why do you think you've failed the first interview? What did you learn? I think the failure comes to from two parts. And I still remember the end up interview he was asking me about a design question. And I spent a lot of time thinking about it. So it's probably five minutes, just pure silence in the interview. And that is really awkward. At that moment, I did not feel that way. I was just getting too deep into my question. But when I think about rethink about it is really awkward. So five minutes silence, I think, first of all, is you're not talking, and you're not going them through, walking them through whatever you are thinking about. And the second reason I failed is because they're asking design. But I spend a lot of time talking about how the feature is going, instead of how it should look. So I think this is the one thing that I learned is in all of the questions, just go back to what they are asking, what they're targeting, instead of following the framework, following whatever in your mind, thinking about the target question. I think that's a heart lesson, but I did reflect on it. And then I learned I need to adjust the two parts. So later in the later interviews, I try to listen carefully to what they're asking and note them down on the paper. And so that makes me to remind me that, oh, I'm going to answer this part. And for the other part is just for all of the thoughts in mind, I tend to note them down and to limit them within 30 seconds, 20 seconds. So in the manageable time, and then walk the interviewer through my thinking process. So they're on the same page with me. That definitely helps me to learn the later interviews and learning the offer in Microsoft. Awesome, congrats. You mentioned earlier saying that you have 10 interviews, so lots of people barely can get one interview. Can you tell us exactly how you learned interviews using maybe DOLINGO as example, your first interview? How do you land it? Yeah, so all of the interviews landing is quite different. I will probably use DOLINGO as an example. That's a unique one that I attended a webinar provided by DOLINGO is talking about how the PM looks like in DOLINGO for one day. After I attended, I connected one of the PM within the webinar. And I think I was just lucky and he connected with me and he's offering a referral to the position. So I get prepared and also he helped me through all of the screening process, I think. And that was how I landed my first interview. But that's unique. And all of the others, I would say it's more general that getting resume ready first of all. And yeah, definitely if my resume was not ready at the time, he will not refer me at all. And that's also one thing to keep in mind. Awesome, awesome. And for everybody who is watching this, we have a free resume template which has been used by 9,000 product managers. You can go to this website and download your free Keter product manager resume and get you prepared for your upcoming job application process. Iris, let me ask you the question. Everybody understand there's a huge recession coming up, like all the scandals about city conveyor banks and lots going on. When we're filming this, it's all during the city conveyor bank. Yeah, it's crazy. So the economy is driving people nuts. But you still power through. We know we're all going through recession, you still power through, you land your PM internship offer from Microsoft. So tell us what's the most important shift that push you to the next level given the last crazy things going on. Yeah, I definitely think there has been one moment I had my mindset shifted and that helped me a lot. First of all, I think anxiety is normal that I was anxious for so long that starting from the process of the interview prep. But then I realized recession is not something with the mind control like no matter how hard I tried is still there. So what I can do is just do whatever in within my control, such as I get my resume ready. I got my portfolio reviewed by NSD by other PMA mentors. And then with all of that, I get my interview skills polished. And with that, that push me to a more positive mindset when doing all of this prep work is not as anxious as before. It's more structured and it's more in control. And on the other hand, I think I'm a firm believer that if you walk every step firmly, you've not ended too bad. So just take every single minor thing seriously, such as to go to the office hour prepared, go to every single interview be prepared and you've not ended too bad. Yeah, exactly. And actually you push it through, you actually end up in really good place and offer from Microsoft. I'm very proud of you. This is amazing. And you also volunteer to be mentors to help other people learning, like interns are very I really love seeing you contributing back to community. This is amazing. What specific advice you have for people want to get started the PM career because lots of people like you who are in school, they're very interested in product management, they're scared about the recession. So what specific advice you would have for them? I think that's a great one. And probably is not an advice advice, but just something from my experience, I totally understand how hard it is you are in school, that you do not have that many time. But then you have a lot of projects, and then you have a lot of connections within the school, you have business school, you can go to all the courses that have connection within the tree has the clients to collaborate with. So go to all of those courses to collaborate and to build up your resume. You can use the course experience as a project you have done, and you can tell the story based on that. So for all of the people who you are interested in product management position, just tailor and also keep all of the experience tailored to the PM experience and tailored to what the job description is asking and then use that as yourself stories. So I think this is the first one. And the second one I have in mind is that start earlier and also get ready earlier. So such as resume. And because most of the time, you know, after COVID, everybody is online, you do not get to meet people in person that many times as before. So your online profile, your first impressions is mainly built up online. If you do not have a great looking in, people will like, Oh, okay, I don't, it's not trustworthy. So get all of your first impression, virtual first impression ready. I think that is also important and have your resume ready. So you always have something to hand out to introduce and then for them to read at the same time. Can you define the virtual impression you mentioned resume and what else should go into the virtual impression? I personally will break down into three parts. So the resume and the link in and also your portfolio. If you do have time, definitely recommend. For the resume part is all about you make it clean, tidy, neat. And link in is either recommended as PMA. I remember this course talking about how you build up and link it in. So have all your experience ready in the profile. So whoever went to it, they will look through that and they will look through schools. So making it as condensed and as far as possible. So others understand what kind of experience you had and also describe it in detail. There's a description session you can put everything in, describe in detail and use the keywords of the fraud management position so that you can be more easily identified by others through the searching. And for the last one is the portfolio and portfolio. If you have your product ready and really write it down into something readable and making it into a blog post or making it into a web page so others can refer to and understand how you think through it. So I think these are the three three parts I have in mind. Awesome. Those are the golden nuggets in the sharing process. And I hope you guys were interested in the product portfolio. We have retraining regarding product portfolio. You can watch this video right here. And you should also go to this website. There's 13 different kind of projects you can work on to create your own product portfolio as well. I'm going to link in the description down below. Awesome. So Iris, thank you for sharing with all of us. When are you starting your internship at Microsoft? I will be at the end of May, but I think the starting date will start still figuring that out and probably May and June-ish and will be 12 weeks. This is exciting. Is that remote, PM job or on site? It's on site. And I think it's starting from this year. And it's so lucky. Starting from this year, everything is shifting on on site and privacy at 29-1 is still hybrid. It's hard. Nice. Nice. Then you can network in the convenience center to give you a return offer. This is exciting. Awesome. So best of luck for your upcoming internship. All right. So for people with any additional questions and how could they contact you? Oh, yeah. So I will have my LinkedIn available and you can just feel free to contact me with the LinkedIn. And so if you have any questions, feel free to chat with me. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you for sharing with us. All right. So, hey guys, if you like this video and all the golden nuggets we shared with you today, please make sure you like this video and watch other playlists we'll put here to get ready for your resumes and interviews. I'm going to see you next time. This is Dr. Nancy Lee from PM Excelsior Diomes. See you guys. Bye.