A University of Wisconsin student will get the rare opportunity to work at Facebook as a part of a summer fellowship for his research in computer science. 

According to a statement from Facebook, UW graduate student Tyler Harter is one of 12 fellowship winners out of nearly 300 applicants nationwide after winning a contest promoting doctorate research in the field of computer science. 

The statement also said he will be interning for Facebook over the summer and working with engineers toward improving the network’s storage capacities.

“This a tremendous opportunity, everyone has been following the news about Facebook. It would be a great experience to get exposure to cutting-edge social media development,” UW Division of Information Technology spokesperson Brian Rust said. 

With companies cutting back on regular employees, computer science-related internships have grown increasingly more difficult to find, he said. 

Harter said although he has not started the internship yet, people who work at Facebook tend to participate in a number of out-of-the-office events, such as taking trips to Alcatraz, the former prison in San Francisco. 

He also said he would most likely be working on website storage and building an infrastructure for the social media site, as well as mentoring with professionals in the field. He said he sees a strong connection between academia and what he will be doing for the company.

The award recognizes Harter’s study of the Hadoop File System, which is an emerging open source data-storage method, the statement said. 

“An HDFS cluster will have a single master machine and many ‘slave’ machines,” Harter said in an email to The Badger Herald. “The master keeps track of all the files in the system while the slaves store the actual data contained inside those files.” 

While this type of technology continues to grow, researchers across the world are looking into ways to further perfect the technology in order to hold more data, Harter said.

Harter said he will conduct further research for his fellowship in the upcoming months with UW graduate professors Andrea and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau. 

He added that he does not know yet whether he will pursue a career in the industry or continue to perform research in academia, but said he is excited to begin the fellowship. 

“Facebook is one of most interesting companies doing storage work right now,” Harter said. “[They] have a lot of great people, and free food, so I’m very excited.”