I wonder if there is any way for a software engineer intern to work at something like FAIR or a team that develops PyTorch? For context: I got a return internship offer to Facebook NY. I am doing MS in things like ML and CS theory and would be happy to work as an engineer on a research team or develop tools for ML (e.g. PyTorch, Glow). I am getting really skeptical about going to FB again: interns cannot pick their projects in advance (e.g. as in Google), projects are assigned automatically. I don't really want to work on some random project unrelated to my interests/experience again (as I had to do this summer). Was anybody able to negotiate in advance to be matched with a specific team? My recruiter just says "you should try your luck and see what you'll get matched with".
One of my friends was an intern on the FAIR team this last summer in MPK and I have another who is currently interning in NYC also FAIR
Are your friends SWE interns too? If so, how did they get matched with FAIR? Were they just lucky with the matching process or did they know/reach out to somebody from FAIR?
Regardless of project, why would you want to intern at the same place twice? the purpose of internship is to explore. Google’s project matching has its drawback too.
Could be because of facebooks return grad offer.
Fair enough, although my previous internship was in a totally different location so there still will be some level of exploration. It would be really great to work with FAIR or on some other ML stuff that Facebook does. But I am leaning towards Google since there is no guarantee that I will get interesting project at FB. At Google, I can at least try to reach out to people whom I know to discuss potential projects and, if they are interested, they can find me during the host matching (which happens before getting an offer). From what I understood at FB, even interested hosts can't go around the automated project matching process.