A cool business meeting at the Santa Cruz beach was just one of the activities that I will remember from my summer internship at "Meetro," the tiny, new Internet startup company. Instead of using the whiteboard as in previous sessions, we brainstormed in the sand. Our discussions were interspersed with surfing in the ice-cold waves.

Meetro is fundamentally an instant messenger service built around the user’s location, rather than just the user’s friends. It also includes social networking features, such as profiles including comments and photos.

Being an intern for Meetro, a Palo Alto company, over the summer was a unique experience. I was the only intern among the six employees working and living together in the multiplex office. Throughout my time there, I had the opportunity to work on various assignments, ranging from Web site development to programming.

With the office embedded in a house, a trip to the kitchen was easy. In the middle of my often-frantic coding, it was convenient to walk to the adjacent kitchen to make myself a sandwich from the well-stocked fridge.

Each Monday at 3 p.m, the company’s CEO Paul Bragiel would pull out his whiteboard for our weekly status meeting, replete with our own specialized jargon for the new features. Project manager Vinnie Lauria also would discuss the ongoing projects with the employees in the room and with programmers and artists living in Turkey, Chile, and Poland, using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calls and Meetro’s own messenger.

During a typical conversation, Lauria would ask me questions about my status on implementing the new features. "So, Patrick," Lauria would ask, "are you still working on the Google Talk plug-in?" When I would respond that I had mostly finished a feature, he would have new jobs ready for me to work on. "Would it be possible to work on adding the ‘dashboard’ into the Windows client?"

Not only did I have the privilege of working on interesting tasks, the company also had fun team events. Monday was designated the weekly bowling night. The company assembled about 10 startup firms from the Palo Alto area, including Skype, Facebook, and A9, to compete in a bowling league known as "Bowling 2.0."

Bowling 2.0 was more than just a tournament; it evolved into a networking event where about 50 people could socialize and exchange business cards with each other. Although I happened to be the odd-man-out, still in my teens, I at least managed to improve my score significantly.

The stereotypical summer internship involves students performing tedious, boring tasks for a huge company, almost the opposite of my experience. In a company of this small size, I got to work on stimulating projects along with the other coworkers.

Generally, my work hours were from about 2 p.m. to 11 p.m. six days of the week, because I was willing to stay late to finish my projects, but I always left long before the others stopped work after 2 a.m.

The other programmers cooked amazing foods for our daily dinners. Cheerful banter consumed us as we devoured heaps of food. The dinners I had varied every day; one day we ate home-made "open source" pizza, and other days we barbecued hot dogs or chicken.

Another bonus of my summer internship was that I thought their instant messaging system interesting enough that I actually started using it. "Meetro takes the best features from social networks and instant messengers and combines them around where you’re located," Bragiel said. "I can find people [there] that I have lost touch with or people with similar interests to me that are near me."

While the internship technically only lasted for the summer, I will stay in touch with my co-workers for a long time. My co-workers, including my boss, were very amiable and enthusiastic, and in the close quarters of the Cowper Street "commune", we got to know each other very well.

My internship, although my first job, may remain my most interesting, unusual experience. I am pleased that the internship did not become the dreaded daily chore of sorting through stacks of papers, typing up spreadsheets, or standing at a copy machine for hours on end – a type of mindless job about which I have heard tragic accounts from other students working at big name companies, where interns are prevalent and undervalued.