Yesterday, I saw the Times had refreshed the application cycles for several of their internship programs. I tweeted, encouraging any students who were curious and had questions to send me a tweet, and I actually heard back from about 10 (!) people.

I'd love to give them all advice and tidbits about what it was like to work at the Times, the pros/cons of internships there, etc., but there are probably a bunch more potential NYT interns out there with whom I won't be able to talk 1:1, but who would really love to hear (and benefit from hearing!) the same stuff.

So here I am, adding a bunch of former and current NYT interns and a bunch of the students who got back to me on Twitter with questions into a branch so we can all have a chat.

Use this as a space to ask questions, get feedback, etc. Assumably not everyone will have the same area of focus or have done the same internship programs, but hopefully we'll be able to shed some light on what it's like to work at 620 8th Ave. anyway.

(Also, any former or current interns — or even Times employees who have had interns over the years — who I don't know yet, please do use the Ask to join button at the top, let me know how you're connected to the NYT, and hop in!)

Hi all. I first want to thank Libby for spreading the word about the NYT intern opportunities. Really appreciate it. Super impressed and excited for Branch too.

I'm Tyler, a Junior at New York University, interested in digital media and marketing. Can anyone shed some light on the "Digital Internship"... What are some typical projects and responsibilities? What have past digital interns done really well? Biggest challenges? Most exciting aspects?

Thanks very much, and excited to keep up with this conversation!

Erica Swallow here! I was the first social media intern at The New York Times and can shed some light on the internship for you! I worked with The Times for two years, most of that time served as an intern, which I then parlayed into a social media consultant role for a bit.

When I was an intern, the typical duties included maintaining all of the social media pages, of which Facebook and YouTube were this biggest duties. It was pretty cool being the voice behind The New York Times' Facebook page! And regarding YouTube, we just uploaded all of the videos produced each day, and also helped on special projects, such as Nicholas Kristof's "Win a Trip" video contest. Twitter duties entailed switching icons and other maintenance.

The most interesting part of the internship, though, is what you make of it. Each intern gets to do research on a chosen related topic and present it to the team at the end of his or her internship. It was awesome seeing what the other interns came up with. When I was there, I worked with the marketing team's ad trafficking specialist to come up with a link tracking method, which happens to still be in place! It's cool that as an intern you can make so much of a difference at such an iconic place.

Also, Tyler, I'm an NYU alum. A number of NYTimes interns over the years were from NYU, so good luck!

My time as an intern spanned over 14 months, and I was able to work alongside some amazing people. My duties veered more on the .com digital marketing, versus social. I mainly looked at traffic analytics and developed brand campaigns to push page views across nytimes.com.

I second Erica’s comment that as an intern, you’re able to make recommendations that are truly valuable (and not just busy work). I was in charge of analyzing the Page Not Found and put forth a proposal to revamp it. It took almost a year of research/planning/approvals, but the new 404 pg was finally put live, and it’s nice to see your work finally get implemented.

It was a great experience, hands down.

Side note: Congrats Libby on Branch!

Hello! Parker Moore, here. I'm a web developer with a keen interest in news and editorials. I've been the only developer over at Leacock's Online Magazine (Leacocks.com) for almost two years and I love working with the team to produce sites which are content-centric and keep returning readership high.

I have followed the work of Jeremy Ashkenas, a web dev at NYTimes and thought interning at NYT would be a great opportunity to learn as well as contribute. I'm a Cornell University Junior studying Information Science, with a focus on info systems and architecture. I thought my skills, abilities and passions would align well with what the NYT does.

What is a web dev internship like at the NYTimes?

Hi Erica and Sarah!

@Erica: Very neat that you were the first social media intern. The duties you described sound pretty great too. I've interned for a couple of social media agencies, so managing clients' Facebook and Twitter accounts is right up my alley.

Small world too. I see you work for Contently. My NYU roommate recently met/interviewed one of the founders for a class assignment!

@Sarah: The research/long-term initiatives sound terrific. I really enjoy those valuable, significant projects on top of ad-hoc and daily ones. All in all, sounds like a phenomenal opportunity.

Thank you both so much for your input! I'd love to chat more, either here on Branch, or via email. Hope to talk again in near future. Thanks very much again!

Hi all! I worked with Erica, Sarah, and several of the other folks added to this thread as a social media and partnerships intern from 2009-2011. I worked about half-time during my last two years of school at Barnard/Columbia.

My duties were more or less similar to what Erica and Sarah have described — though, in fairness, I'm not sure whether these are standard to all Times internships, or whether ours were unique because we all worked for the same group. My project looked at ways the Times could organize our outreach on Facebook and Twitter around demographics (e.g. students, New Yorkers) rather than verticals (e.g. Politics), as some of our competitors were doing.

The best part of working at the Times was getting a front-row seat to a lot of the issues and changes you would ordinarily be reading about in the press. When I started, our job was still largely to evangelize social media to the newsroom (we were on the business side within marketing) — explaining how to use social, setting up pages for verticals, etc.

By the time I left less than two years later, editorial had begun to take the reins on social — which in 2012 seems like standard practice, but was at that point a fairly new strategy — and build a team to manage it led by @sashak, @lexinyt, and @lheron, among others. As an intern, somehow, I got to see all of that happen, which at an organization like the Times is really kind of amazing.

@Parker: I was an interactives intern at the Times this past summer (2012). I worked on Imago, an internal tool that processed Olympics photos from NYT photogs & wires. Imago had a Rails/Backbone interface for rating and tagging the photos and for making slideshows. We ended up processing the photos so quickly that we beat the tape delay on some events and had a bunch of slideshows featured on the front page. I had fun, learned a lot about webdev/news/software engineering and worked with some ridiculously smart people. Sam Birch was the other intern in summer 2012; Evan Carmi and Michael Strickland were the interns in 2011 and built Fech, an FEC filing parser.

I'm now at ProPublica doing news apps. Happy to answer Qs here/twitter/email.