Denika Boyd and Aaron Tutein never imagined they'd have the opportunity to work at Facebook, even as interns.
As residents of St. Croix, an island district of the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, money is tight and few people ever get an opportunity to leave the island, especially for a job in Silicon Valley. Neither Boyd nor Tutein knew how to write a line of computer code or hack a firewall, and they didn't have experience building apps, or marketing tech products, either.
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But none of that mattered to the Virgin Islanders, who both finished two-week Facebook internships last Friday. After all, even at the social network, culinary interns are meant to cook, not hack. "We're great with cooking and feeding the [other] guys that hack and create apps and all of that," says Tutein with a laugh. "I mean, they gotta eat. That's where we come in."
In two weeks at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., the duo did everything the company's culinary employees do, from ordering ingredients from the suppliers to preparing food on the cooking line for Facebook's hungry engineers. Boyd and Tutein even had their own embroidered chef coats emblazoned with the company logo.
They were Facebook's first culinary interns from the Virgin Islands, and if all goes according to plan, they won't be the last.
Tutein and Boyd first met then-Facebook executive chef Josef Desimone last April on their home turf. Desimone visited St. Croix alongside fellow Facebook culinary colleagues Dean Spinks and Tony Castellucci to serve as a judge for A Taste of St. Croix, an island wide-cooking competition included in the week-long St. Croix Food and Wine Experience, a community fundraiser.
As part of the trip, the Facebook chefs spent time working with CTEC, a local vocational high school with a budding culinary program. It was there that Desimone met Boyd, 20, and Tutein, 21, culinary students taking the class as part of CTEC's adult education program.

Denika Boyd (L) and Aaron Tutein finished their two-week culinary internship at Facebook last week. The two chefs live in St. Croix, an island district of the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean.
Image: Kurt Wagner/Mashable
CTEC students helped Desimone and his team plan and cook an end-of-week barbecue for the festival. When all stomachs were full, Desimone promised Boyd and Tutein, who has caught his eye as promising cooks, that he'd find a way to get them to Facebook. Contact info was exchanged, and Desimone left behind two very eager Facebook hopefuls when he returned to California at the end of the week.
Three months later, on a Monday morning in mid-July, Desimone was killed in a motorcycle accident.
In addition to the heartbreak it caused for his colleagues, Desimone's sudden death also put the internships he had promised Boyd and Tutein in limbo. It wasn't long afterward that Spinks, Castellucci, and Desimone's brother Billy, who was also in St. Croix for the festival, decided to fulfill their friend's promise.
"When I got the phone call, I dropped my phone," laughs Boyd. "When I heard the words 'internship at Facebook,' I just dropped my phone. I went crazy. I said 'yes, yes, yes' to everything. I didn't even give him a chance to talk."
Boyd and Tutein were headed to Silicon Valley to work at the world's largest social network.
Back in St. Croix, Boyd runs a kitchen at a local pizzeria. Tutein is a line cook at IHOP. On an island of roughly 50,000 people, the culinary experiences can be vastly different, says Tutein. A family of four in the U.S. Virgin Islands had a median income of roughly $40,000 in 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. That year, only four U.S. states had a median household income below $60,000.
"We're not a third world country now, but there's just a few select things that we don't have [that are] versatile up here," says Tutein. Both Boyd and Tutein were impressed with the cooking equipment available at Facebook during their internship, particularly the size of the kitchen. Tutein says he "rocked out" using the wok to make stir fry. Boyd had never seen ingredients like potato flower or egg replacer before.
Spinks, who has worked at Facebook nearly six years and now serves in Desimone's role as one of two executive chefs along with Castellucci, built out the two week program for the interns. The duo even planned a St. Croix-themed happy hour for employees, serving roughly 1,500 dishes, says Spinks.
"I think it was a good experience for them to write the menu, order the food," he says. "They saw every single step, from how to do the order guides to how to put the food away when it comes in to prepping the food the day before. It was a pretty big learning experience for them, and they did very well."

Boyd and Tutein did everything Facebook's culinary staff does during their two week internship, including prepping food for lunch at one of the company's main dining halls called Epic.
Image: Kurt Wagner/Mashable
These types of managerial skills are transferrable to any kitchen, but the internship didn't simply open new doors for cooking. Neither intern had ever been to California, and Castellucci and his family took them to San Francisco one Saturday during their stay. Boyd says she could do without sushi and the "cold" 52-degree weather, but the experience left her hungry to make it back.
"My dream right now is to work [at Facebook]," she says. "I would definitely come back here if I get a job. I'm willing to work, I'm willing to move, willing to make the sacrifice."
Those jobs aren't easy to come by, and a Facebook spokesperson did not comment on whether they have openings available for Boyd and Tutein. But Boyd and Tutein have blazed a trail — it won't be long before others follow in their footsteps.
The culinary internship was possible because Facebook opened its kitchen, but it was the St. Croix Foundation, a community focused non-profit on the island, that opened its wallet.
The foundation paid for everything — flights, hotel rooms, spending cash, and even tablet computers for the interns — a total of $10,000. It was a cost the foundation was happy to pay, even though it hadn't raised the necessary funds. Desimone's death meant the internships were uncertain. When Boyd and Tutein received the green light, the St. Croix Foundation didn't have time to find a sponsor.
"We just didn't want them to miss this opportunity, so we covered the costs up front," says St. Croix Foundation COO Deanna James, who added that the foundation is still fundraising to cover total costs. "This is a huge opportunity for both Denika and Aaron, but also for young people who are looking at them as role models."
The "role models" aspect means a lot in St. Croix, where 50% of adults don't have a high school diploma and the homicide rate (roughly 36 homicides for every 100,000 citizens) is the eighth highest in the world.
A local newspaper, The Virgin Islands Daily News, first wrote about the interns before they ever started at Facebook, and continued to follow their experience.
"We made sure the community was well aware of it," says Roger Dewey, St. Croix Foundation CEO. "We're hoping that would spur other young people to recognize that there's a career path in culinary, a career path in the hospitality business. We're a tourist destination, but so often if our young people are not exposed to the job opportunities, they don't see where they fit in."

The IHOP in St. Croix where Tutein works as a line cook. The restaurant is slightly different than those in the States, he says, and things like updated menus and new cookware don't get to the island as quickly.
Image: Aaron Tutein
For the St. Croix Foundation, there was a never a question of whether or not Boyd and Tutein would make the trip to California. That decision was easy. What could be more challenging is deciding how best to continue the program next year.
Both the St. Croix Foundation and Facebook say they want a formal partnership to keep the program alive, and Spinks says he and the Facebook culinary staff will host as many interns as can make the trip. Facebook paid both interns for their two weeks of work, but nothing has been established that will determine how costs will be handled in the future.
It's simply a matter of finding the money, and Facebook certainly has plenty. "This was a great experience, and we hope to work with St. Croix on how it could become an ongoing program," a company spokesperson told Mashable when asked if Facebook will help financially in the future.
Both Boyd and Tutein spoke graciously of the St. Croix Foundation and Facebook. Now, they say, it's a matter of turning their two-week adventure into something greater.
"[I want to] make my mark in history, create some things with my signature on it," says Tutein.
Perhaps, one day, that signature will belong to a Facebook chef.
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