Facebook launches its own Fellowship Program

Computer Science, Engineering Ph.D students: Facebook wants you

Citing efficient photo storage, distributed computation, and crowdsourced translations as just a few of the most challenging programming, design, and engineering problems the company has faced in recent times, Facebook is now turning to Ph.D students to help solve the next generation of technical challenges.

Today marks the launch of the Facebook Fellowship Program.

"We believe that the academic community plays a central role in addressing many of our most challenging research questions, and we created this fellowship to extend our involvement and collaboration with the academic world," wrote Greg Badros, a director engineering at Facebook.

Full-time Ph.D students working at a U.S. university in any of a number of research areas--Internet economics, cloud computing, social computing, data mining, machine learning, and systems and information retrieval--are qualified to apply for one of five fellowships in the Facebook Fellowship Program for the 2010-2011 school year.

Of course, students will be expected to be studying Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, System Architecture, or some other related area.

Students awarded a fellowship will have their tuition and fees covered for the school year and will receive a $30,000 stipend in addition to other benefits.

Applications must be submitted by February 15 and recipients will be notified by March 29. To see full details for the Fellowship Program, see the official Facebook page.