By Jocelyn Goldfein (Director of Engineering, Facebook)
Applications for Facebook graduate fellowships for academic year 2012-2013 is now open. The deadline for fellowship applications is December 16, 2011.

We’re also excited to announce that we’ll be doubling the number of awards we give out this year. These fellowships support exceptional Ph.D. students in a wide range of academic topics.

This year, we are also increasing focus in “systems” areas (Compilers, Databases, Distributed Computing, Fault Tolerance, and Networking). These areas represent a substantial portion of challenges we face, and we want the Fellowship Program to reflect this. At the same time, we want to continue to award fellowships in the other disciplines like Internet Economics, Machine Learning, Data Science, and Social Computing.

Doubling the program allows us to do both.

We have simplified the application process as well. For the recommendation letters, we only require a 2-3 short paragraphs summarizing the quality of research contributions as well as comparing the applicant with his/her peers. A detailed description of the research is unnecessary. For more info and to register, click here.

Editor’s note: Got a question for our guest blogger? Leave a message in the comments below.
About the guest blogger: Jocelyn Goldfein is a Director of Engineering at Facebook. Her mission is to create features which engage and delight users of Facebook, and to make Facebook Engineering an organization which engages and delights engineers. Prior to Facebook, Jocelyn was a VP of R&D at VMware. Jocelyn has held leadership roles in several early to mid-stage startups. Jocelyn holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Subscribe to updates from Jocelyn.