Here's what it's really like to be an intern at Facebook (FB)

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As summer vacation winds down, many college kids are heading back to campus ready regale each other with stories of their summer internships.

Few will have more bragging rights than former Facebook interns.

The social media giant has a particularly robust and perk-laden program, earning it first place on last year's internship ranking from job site Glassdoor.

So, what's it really like to be a Facebook intern at its Menlo Park headquarters?

Think cool projects, cushy wages, and an emphasis on empowerment. Facebook treats its interns like regular employees, so even though they're living together dorm-style in free apartments and taking the occasional coordinated trip down the coast to Santa Cruz or Yosemite on the company's dime, they're working their butts off too.

A few 20-somethings who've been through the program dished on what it was like:

Interns make big bucks and get freebies galore.

For those uninitiated to the Silicon Valley status quo, the pay and perks that Facebook interns get sound almost ridiculous.

Although Facebook declined to discuss specifics, Glassdoor lists salaries for interns between $6,400 and $7,500 a month. A recent survey cited by Bloomberg pegged wages at $8,000 a month. One intern showed us an offer letter for $8,400 a month.

That would be $100,800 annually.

To help that sink in, the national wage index was $46,481 when the Social Security Administration last compiled data in 2014.

And that's not to mention the free food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner on Facebook's Disneyland-esque campus, the free housing, the free shuttles to-and-from said housing, and all of the activities (a weekend in Yosemite, a day renting out Great America amusement park, theatre performances, Alcatraz tours, scavenger hunts, and more). We also heard about a "wellness" stipend in the range of $240 that one intern used to book a weekend trip to Tahoe.

Of course, those lavish perks come with big expectations (and lots of access).

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. Now, she 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, Hyla Wallis, who runs the intern program, 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 (while declining to reveal his question, noting that interns adhere very closely to Facebook's confidentiality policy).

See the rest of the story at Business Insider