Interning for Microsoft between her junior and senior years, Victoria Chin knew that there was a prospect of a full-time role being offered to her at the end of the summer. Leaning on the skills, confidence and work ethic she honed at the Raikes School, Chin caught the eye and earned the approval of her managers to turn that prospect into a concrete offer.
Her success, however, didn’t come without asking a lot of questions of her peers at Microsoft—an important practice she learned early in her Raikes School career.
“The first two weeks of the internship were pretty challenging—there was so much terminology specific to the company that I wasn't familiar with,” Chin said. “After the first couple of weeks, I set up meetings with team members to ask questions and understand what challenges they were facing with debugging their code. That really helped me better understand the problem and what they were looking for from me.”
This solution closely mirrored lessons from a first-year Raikes School class titled “Innovation Processes” that stuck with Victoria as she embarked on her internship.
“I took a ton of inspiration from that class,” Chin said. “It was focused on customer discovery—talking with customers to understand their needs and pain points—and that really helped guide my approach to problem solving at Microsoft.”
Once Chin opened that dialogue with her colleagues on her team, the work—and opportunities—opened up as well.
“Throughout the summer, I had some good conversations with my manager and was able to deliver my project on time and meet their expectations,” Chin said. “Based on my performance and the company’s needs, the return offer came for a full-time position.”
Coming back to campus for her senior year and buoyed by her success at Microsoft, Chin built on her momentum as a team leader on her Design Studio capstone project. Partnering with the fashion brand Buckle, Victoria and her team built an AI-powered search tool that matched “natural” search language with clothing products offered by Buckle. This proof of concept offered a tech solution to an existing problem, giving Buckle the tools to present both employees and customers with a more streamlined experience.
“Before, if you were to do a search for professional clothing, you might not get back things like blazers or trousers,” Chin explained. “You’d only get back clothing with the word 'professional’ in the name or description. We wanted to develop a natural language search that's able to understand contextually what ‘professional’ means and show those items to users.”
The team more than delivered, winning the Platinum Award—Design Studio’s top honor— for the 2024-2025 school year. A perfect way to cap her Husker career, Chin is looking forward to building on that growth as she enters the professional world.
“Having the job offer was already great, but this Design Studio capstone experience here at the Raikes School really fueled my growth this year,” Chin said. “I got to learn so much about the business and computer science side of the industry—I think that’s really helped me stand out and feel confident when I’m faced with solving a problem.”
