Microsoft Corporation India Pvt. Ltd today announced that Abishek Kumarasubramanian from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras has been selected for a one year internship with Bill Gates and will work directly with his technical assistant’s team in Redmond.

We are now at the penultimate stage of the Code4Bill Contest. The final 19 selected candidates are completing their two months internship at Microsoft India Development Center, Hyderabad and Microsoft Research Centre, Bangalore.

I am an engineering student hailing from Chennai who just finished his bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras. I was the typical student who wrote all possible medical/engineering entrances and wanted to be a doctor and ended up at IIT :). I had no idea about which branch to join and joined EE because the IT field was having a slip then and I thought it was always possible to learn CS from the outside!

However within a semester I realized my true interests and passion lay in Computer Science and Algorithms and started pursuing them. I started participating in several programming contests online and liked the mathematical/algorithmic beauty and the challenges posed by them. I am a winner of numerous programming contests organized by several local colleges in India. I have also represented India in the ACM World Finals. I am an avid TopCoder and am very passionate about competing, which has led me all the way to the top.