Introduction

Hi! This is my first blog here on MSDN, so I thought it should be an intro. My name is Ricky Tan, and I was born and grew up in the tropical island of Penang in Malaysia. I’m ethnic Chinese and was educated in English, but I also speak some Chinese and Malay. I came to the United States to further my education, and completed my Bachelor’s degree at Iowa State University. I then went to work in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for the one-year OPT and then continued on with the Master of Science, Computer Science at Maharishi University of Management in Iowa. After completing the on-campus requirements of the degree, I opted to take the remaining courses as Distance Education while working full-time. 

It was at that moment in time, March 2006, that I was contacted by a recruiter from Volt, who asked if I was interested in a position at Microsoft, and I said yes. So I went through the interview process and started as a contractor SDET with the Crossbow Runtime project, in the UI Framework Client team. Three months later, I was given the chance to go through another interview process to change to FTE, which I gladly did. 

Today is exactly one month after I was hired as FTE, and I’m more happy and excited than I've ever been. I've been working on the Vista test pass for the .Net Framework, and I'll be working on the new Acropolis (Smart Client) project.