On Sunday and Monday Chris and I hosted the fourth and final social evening and meeting of the Microsoft Student Partner Programme 2004 back in Reading. It meant saying a tearful farewell to many of the MSPs who will now be entering the commercial world but it also enabled us to welcome back some of our interns – Hardeep, Neil and Michael – who will all be MSPs in 2005.
The event kicked off on Sunday evening with a trip down the River Thames on the Caversham Princess towards Henley which is renowned for its Regatta passing via Thames Valley Park and the home of both Microsoft and Oracle. Amazingly we didn’t lose any of the MSPs over board or in the local nightclubs of Reading and on Monday all 40 MSPs made it safely back safely to TVP. On reflection this was a pretty monumental feat given the fact that Victoria the stunning barmaid on the boat had “inadvertently” captured the attention of the predominantly male audience of students. Only two of the MSPs however managed to get her email address and you should have heard some of the chatup lines which included advice on the merits of installing WindowsXP Service Pack 2…
For the final event we managed to pull together a great lineup of speakers from across Microsoft including Mike Shaw (our resident expert on Writing Secure Code), Stephen Turner (ASP.NET 2.0 guru), Lars Lindstedt (Mr Microsoft Technology Centre), the inimitable Deep (Windows Server 2003) and Chris Reece (Windows MediaCenter 2005) as well as Alistair Baker the new Managing Director of Microsoft UK.
As always great fun, merriment and of course learning seemed to have been had by all and the event evaluation score of 4.5 (out of 5) was pretty amazing so it looks like all of the hard work was worthwhile.
I really can’t believe that almost a year has passed since we kicked off the Microsoft Student Partner programme in the UK and it’s been a hugely rewarding and fun experience for me personally however I’m now going to take more of a backseat role with the 2005 programme and I’m handing over the reins to Chris and Emily. I’ll be looking after the Imagine Cup UK 2005 but I faithfully promise to be at all of next year’s meetings and social evenings however I would like to make it officially known that there will be no pole dancing…
And finally which of the MSPs do you think managed to extract Victoria’s email address?