During my senior year at Mississippi State, I worked as a research assistant under Dr. John T. Foley on WebTOP, located at http://www.webtop.org. I used Microsoft Visual J++ every day for a year to use Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) to simulate physics lab experiments. For example, I wrote the "Laser" module, which simulates a laser beam projecting on a surface, and the "Reflection and Refraction" module, which I explain later.

While writing the "Reflection and Refraction" module, I discovered a bug in Visual J++ where the yellow-highlighted current statement line would get off by one line every time I jumped out of a file. Since my project had numerous files, the current statement would move farther away from the real line being executed the more I tried to debug my program. I would have to keep track of where I was, with pen and paper. It was an incredibly frustrating experience, to say the least.

On the morning of my Microsoft interview, when I found out that I would be interviewing with the Visual Studio team as a Software design engineer in Testing, I was elated. Not just because I would have the opportunity to meet actual members of the team—I was really elated because I would be able to tell them about this bug.