Every year since its inception five years ago, the Facebook University (FBU) Program has brought in trailblazing interns who get to work alongside Facebook employees in a fast-paced, mission-driven, impact-focused environment. FBU is an eight-week immersive training program that offers experience across engineering and business roles to rising college sophomores and juniors from traditionally underrepresented communities. This year we went behind the scenes to learn about the projects our students took on and what they gained. While the project variety spans a wide spectrum, we bring you a slice of what some of our 2017 students were tasked with, achieved and took away. Take a moment to learn more about the program through the lens of our Analytics, Global Marketing, and Operations interns.

I worked on analyzing temporary reactions to Facebook posts and its affect on the Facebook platform as a whole. This project allowed me to edit existing data pipelines, build my own pipeline, work on dashboards, and run a lot of queries.

A typical day for me would start off with a brainstorming session where I’d look at new angles for my project and figure out how to analyze the data, run queries to find the proper data, or determine how to visualize that data in the most effective manner. Near mid-day, I'd take a break and join in on any number of Facebook activities like improv comedy shows, team lunches, or Facebook Resource Group diversity events, just to name a few. In between events and my project work, I'd have coffee chats with people from different teams. The rest of my day was filled with getting insights and meeting with my team to make sure I was on track for my project as well as using that time to determine if they needed help with anything.

One of the lessons I learned while interning was that it's common to experience “Impostor Syndrome”. At first I felt underqualified to be working at Facebook with such intelligent people (most of whom had degrees in Math/CS while I was pursuing a finance degree). After discussing with others, I realized that everyone feels this way sometimes — the important thing is to not let that mentality get in the way of doing your best work. As interns, we are selected for our potential to learn and be great data scientists, so it’s more important to embrace the opportunity and the time you have at Facebook.

I worked on the Facebook Events team and focused on the consumer side of music events in Brazil. I explored how Brazilians interact with Page-based music events and specifically the way people choose to spread the events in these networks. In addition to the analysis side of the project, I created a dashboard for tracking the metrics I used and also explored product design by creating mocks for products that might help to improve the sharing stats that I discovered. It’s hard to say what an average day is like since its all dependent on who I’m meeting with and the smaller projects that might come up. A typical day might look like this:

Advice to a future FBU intern? Be open to feedback. It feels nice to get praised but none of us are perfect, and we can all grow, so it’s good idea to find the areas where you have room for improvement and act on them.

I worked on the SMB (Small Medium Business) Publishing Team and my main project was sorting through data to determine what percentage of total revenue came from each monetization model. I began with determining KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) for each monetization model by meeting with different account managers on my team. I started by creating my own query to download the information I needed from the database I was working with. I then sorted through the data and constructed a deep-level analysis. In addition, I created an excel workbook that would sort the data automatically and do a high-level analysis of the data.

An average day for me mostly consisted of sitting at my desk working on my project (seems boring, but it’s not!) and going to a meeting here and there. I came in around 8:30 AM to read emails and get any little tasks done before my meetings. Some days I’d have more meetings than others, but I’d often have at least one day a week that would be completely free for me to focus on my research. There were also FBU events and speaker series throughout my time here that I attended whenever I wanted a break and some time to connect with others.

Coming from a STEM background, I really wasn’t sure what to expect this summer. I was pleasantly surprised because I ended up working with data, which is definitely my forte.

I worked on a variety of projects this summer, focused on account research, data collection and opportunity assessments. My work was used to analyze data and provide insights to the SMB team to better help them meet their goals. All throughout the summer, I worked closely with the teams by attending their meetings, shadowing calls, and conducting interviews with team members to develop an understanding of their needs and tailor the content of my project and deliverables.

An average day consisted of arriving to the office at 9 AM, having a working breakfast, synching in with other interns or account managers on my team, and checking emails. I would usually have at least one meeting to attend with my team or a FBU program training. At noon, I would take my lunch break at the café and chat with interns or full-time employees. I shadowed calls and interviewed account managers as needed, and devoted the rest of my day to my project research and work.

I was on the North America Content Moderation team in Facebook's Austin, Texas office. I worked on two projects this summer. The first one was ensuring that the 2B people on Facebook feel safe and supported. I approached it by auditing the flow to report content, ensuring that users could easily report content that did not belong on the platform and that the messages Facebook sent to the community were done so with empathy. For my second project, the objective was to decrease the error rates of incorrectly escalating a content report. I approached that by analyzing our policies and the tools that are used to review content.

The average day consisted of me getting to the office at 9 AM to eat breakfast and starting work at 9:30 AM. Throughout the day, I was typically busy learning more about internal processes and performing any deep dives I thought were necessary. Everyone around me was very supportive, so I often turned to them to ask any questions. I even learned SQL just by asking questions, such as what a certain syntax means! I ended my day at 6 PM and ate dinner at the office with other interns and Facebookers.

Advice to a future FBU intern? Proactively reach out to people on cross-functional teams. I scheduled meetings to share my findings and hear others’ thoughts. This helped me develop recommendations with many different perspectives in mind, which in return made it a lot easier to implement.

The Developer Operations Growth & Review team supports developers who build apps by helping them use and deploy their products on Facebook's family of products. As an intern on the team, I worked on teaching developers and business decision makers about Facebook products and how to implement them with their apps. This project required me to create the content that would be shared with the user. To complete this task, it was essential for me to quickly learn business writing skills and communicate with various other teams to ensure that the content I wrote was correct and accessible to all users.

Prior to my internship, I did not have a technical background so my project was dependent on project management, writing, and cross-functional communication skills. This meant that I could spend an entire day in meetings with engineers, product marketers, and content strategists, but on the following day, I could spend the day writing content describing Facebook Developer Products.

Advice to a future FBU intern? Know that it's okay if your project plan pivots throughout the summer! Be flexible to new approaches, while remaining focused on making the most impact.