How to successfully apply at GSoC (and other similar efforts )
[ This used to be a draft on my hard disc for much too long ]
For over 15 years there is Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and each year in spring there is the same ritual: students apply to the various mentoring organisations in the hope to be part of summer of code.
And in all the years that I have been mentoring or being admin for the JBoss Community, I have seen the same pattern: Some students are already active in some of the projects, so applying is relatively easy, while other students are very interested, but don’t really know how to approach the organisations. And then there are proposals that are variations of “take me”.
I always think this situation is disappointing both for the organisations and mentors that have to plow through the submissions (we had one year more than 70). But also for the students where many have a high potential, but don’t show it in the submission.
Phases of applying
For me key phases of applying to are
- If you don’t participate in a community yet, pick one that is closest to your interest (“scratch your own itch”).
- Reach out to the community in their communication channels. In GSoC every mentoring organisation has provided various ways of contact on the respective GSoC page
- Get to know the application / software you want to work on during summer of code: download and compile it, try to make a tiny improvement and submit it to the project. This can be documentation or a small patch or whatever comes to mind. The latter is not required by Google. It helps you though to better understand what may be coming and helps the organisation to see that you are able to deal with the basics (or are willing and able to learn them).
- Once you are confident that you want to work with this organisation, contact a potential mentor and talk more about the details. Mentoring organisations in GSoC have a list of projects for the interns that can be used to jumpstart such a discussion. If you have your own idea don’t be shy to present that to the mentor.
- When the application window has opened, submit a draft and discuss it with the potential mentor. You can refine it as often as you like. When it gets more solid, also submit a version of the final PDF (which you can re-submit after changes).
- Make sure the final PDF is really in the GSoC system. Google will not accept you into the program if that is missing. Do not wait for the last day to submit the final PDF.
Write a good proposal
For the proposal itself it is important that you describe the work you are going to do and when. For GSoC this includes the evaluation points on which the mentor will rate you pass or fail. The proposal needs to include what you want to achieve until each of those milestones. Again, talk to the mentors, as they will be able to help you coming up with a plan
What I have seen is that sometimes good proposals were “thrown over the fence” without any interactions with the org or the mentor. For an organisation it is super hard to figure out if the student would be a fit (culture wise) to the org or not.
Take me please…
Over the time I have seen many proposals that literally said “take me” and similar. I have also seen in one year a number of submissions that were clearly un-inspired copy&paste proposals. Please don’t do that. It hurts the participating orgs, as they need to spend time on this and your chance to be taken from such a submission is exactly 0%.
What then?
After the students have submitted their proposals, slots are requested from Google by the participating organisations. A mentoring organisation will often enough get less slots than requested, so they will again go through all the proposals and select the best (fitting) ones. So your proposal will be evaluated again — staying in touch with the potential mentor will certainly help your cause.
To learn more about Google Summer of Code, visit https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/
