By Meha Goyal
Note about the author: Meha Goyal graduated in May 2025 and is now employed as a Software Engineer at Meta.
I had the opportunity to intern as a Software Engineer at Meta. I spent 12 weeks at the Menlo Park campus on the WhatsApp Business Messaging Platform Metrics and Insights team. With an exciting end-to-end development project and an amazing, supportive team, I developed both my technical and collaborative skills to create an impactful contribution to my team’s work.
Rise and Shine
My days start at around 7:00 am, giving me about an hour to get ready, eat, and pack for work. I stayed with my family during my internship, with about a 30-45 minute commute to the Menlo Park office. Interns can stay in corporate housing, or choose Meta’s stipend option to finance their own apartment choices, or even keep the stipend and stay with family!
Meta has an extensive shuttle network throughout the Bay Area, so despite the long commute, I had a shuttle stop just five minutes from my home. I ended up meeting and connecting with several other Meta interns and full time employees on the shuttle to the office!
Morning Meetings
At Meta, mornings were reserved for individual work and team meetings! My team limited the number of meetings per week to give us as much time as possible to work on our projects and with our peers.
On Mondays, I would start my day with a product update meeting with my team, where our team lead would discuss trends in our product’s growth over the past week. On Thursdays, my team would have a weekly stand up meeting, during which I’m able to not only scope out my progress on my work to the team, but also learn about the work the rest of my team does on the product itself. These meetings would also include our cross-functional partners, like our content design and data science partners working on the product, so it was a great opportunity to learn more about the other aspects of developing and productionizing new projects!
Lunch
This is one of my favorite parts of the day! Meta has fully catered meals for employees, and I’m able to enjoy a variety of cuisines within their cafeteria. My goto was the Mezze cafeteria’s Falafel, it was a bit far away but super yummy! During lunch, I usually sit with my team, and there, I’m able to get to know my team members on a more personal level. For example, I was able to learn about my manager’s career journey, and why he chose to work here. One piece of advice I would give to other interns is to take advantage of these lunches, as you’ll be able to ease into the team better, and also are able to ask questions that aren’t as relevant to your work itself.
Collaborating with Peers
Post-lunch, I had my mentor and manager meetings! I’d have about 1-2 meetings per week with each of my mentors and my manager, as well as any team members who specialized in the particular technology I was working with that week!
My meetings with my manager were a great time for me to check in on my progress, get high level feedback about my performance, and come up with new ideas to extend my project impact! My mentor meetings were more technical, focused on project problem solving and next steps.
To ensure the best use of both my and my mentors’ time, I sent out calendar invites for our meetings and linked a running google doc with the agenda for each meeting and notes from the previous meetings! I’d keep track of questions I had or problems I ran into, and if I couldn’t resolve them after 30 minutes of debugging and research, I’d discuss the issues during the meeting or bring them up ad hoc!
Wrapping up my Work
This is where I get focused time to finish my project. Since the project goes over the course of three months, it’s imperative that I keep track of my progress and ensure that I make steady progress over the course of that time. To do this, I keep a running checklist of tasks I need to finish and the date/time I want to get these tasks completed. It’s also important not to hold yourself strictly to the checklist, as there could be bugs or roadblocks you could run into.
After I make enough progress through the day, I head home. On the commute back, I usually reflect on my day and what I learned through it. I’m always excited to get back home to enjoy the rest of my summer through hanging out with my friends, taking walks, and staying active!