Here's what it's really like to intern at Facebook

As an English and literature major at Spelman College in Atlanta, Janelle Gregory never pictured herself working at a tech company in Silicon Valley.

But she applied on a whim to Facebook's FB University for Business program in 2015 after a recruiter visited her school and now earnestly describes her experience as "changing the trajectory" of her life.

After her internship last summer, she returned a second year to research and work on the company's safety products. 

"We're not just here to do grunt work," she says. "[Facebook] allows us to really head our own projects, they really listen to what we have to say. They take our opinions seriously."

Facebook assigns interns to nearly every team — there's no project that's off-limits because it's too secret, intern coordinator Hyla Wallis says. Interns are also given the same access to internal resources and information as regular employees. 

Cesar Ilharco, who interned at Facebook last fall, tells Business Insider that he even asked Mark Zuckerberg a question at its weekly all-hands meeting once. 

"He'll answer anything," Ilharco says, but declines to reveal his question, noting that interns adhere very closely to Facebook's confidentiality policy. 

Ilharco, who has had internships at Facebook, Google, Amazon and, currently, Quora, says that one of the things that surprised him most during his internship was really realizing how big the company really is and how much it's working on. 

"When you work at Facebook, you really get a grasp on the complexity of it," he says. "I think from the outside you underestimate all it's doing and how everything works together."

Of course he's long been familiar with the website and its apps, but working there opened his eyes to some of its "moonshots" like its solar-powered drone, telecom project, and VR efforts.

Wallis says that Facebook always hopes to make as many full-time offers as possible after an intern cycle (worth noting that it pretty much as interns all year round since it has summer, winter, and fall sessions). 

In that way, internships are almost like extended job interviews, where both sides really get to know each other. 

A less obvious perk for Facebook is that it uses the program as a way to train managers. Every intern gets assigned a full-time employee to be there manager who will work with them one-on-one to craft, execute, and evaluate a specific project. Any employee can volunteer to step into that role with an intern. 

"We're really investing in the future of management," Wallis says. 

Meredith Singletary, a software engineering intern on Facebook's infrastructure team, says she thrived on all the responsibility and ownership she had over her project. 

The 12-week internship started with an orientation and engineering sprint meant to get her adjusted to Facebook's codebase (this is a shortened version of the six-week "Bootcamp" that all new engineering employees go through).

"Learning a new programming language and codebase and working with a new team was really challenging, but a very rewarding one." 

Because the interns work, live, and explore the Bay Area together, friendships form fast. 

McGregory says that the relationships that she created during her first summer transcended the internship, and she had daily text conversations with her Facebook friends even after they all went back to their respective universities. 

Even better? The majority came back for year two as well. 

It was "definitely surprising" how uncompetitive all the interns were, she says, given how competitive the internship was to get in the first place. 

"It's not an environment when people are trying to underhand you, or do better work than you," she says. "Everyone's really trying to help each other." 

Wallis says that to seal a spot, prospective interns should make sure to highlight projects they've worked on outside of the classroom.

"We like to see where they're already working on their influence and leadership skills," she says. "We see ourselves at Facebook as a community and culture of builders, so we like to see how people are thinking about things a little bit differently."

Singletary applied online, cold, without having talked to a recruiter or current employee. 

"Most people think you need to know someone to get in," Singletary said. "I'm a case in point, that that's not true. Don't be afraid to apply. Don't be the person who is holding yourself back."