Avail, Apply and Ace
Having worked with various college-level technical communities and groups, it’s common to come across scenarios where individuals lose out on applications, scholarships and event registrations. You must be wondering why.Well, it’s the ‘I didn’t know’ Syndrome. Being a part of technical groups as an undergrad student has it’s own perks (a lot of them, actually). This article aims at covering a few, to leverage you to utilise community resources optimally.
Scholarships, Awards and Grants
Legions of corporates and educational institutes are investing in empowering motivated and skilled students in the technological sphere. Some of the ventures focus on outreach contribution and leadership skills as well. Here’s a list of scholarships and awards that you could apply to!
- The Women Techmakers Scholars Program (APAC)
- WeTech Qualcomm Global Scholarship
- WeTech Scholarship Juniper (specifically offered to MIT Manipal)
- Adobe India Women-in-Technology Scholarship
- Venkat Panchapakesan Memorial Scholarship (Google)
- Heidelberg Laureate Forum Fellowship
- Indian National Science Academy Fellowship (INSA)
- IIT Summer Fellowships: Eklavya, SURGE, SRIP, IITM Summer Fellowship Program and IIT Roorkee Summer Fellowship
- Scholarships for JavaScript and CSS conferences (JSConf EU, CSSconf)
- Scholarships for Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) and Grace Hopper Celebration India (GHCI)
- Facebook GHC Scholarship
- Diversity Scholarship (JS Kongress, React.js, MongoDB)
- Red Hat Women in Open Source Award
- ACM-W scholarships and awards (International Best ACM-W Officer Contest)
- Student of Vision ABIE Award
- WWC Connect India Conference Grant
In addition to these, Shraddha Agrawal has compiled a curated list of scholarships and opportunities for college-going girls, here.
Global Programs and Internships
Google Summer of Code
The program comprises a 3 month remote internship for ardent college student developers. Once selected by an organisation for a given project, the GSoCers work with their mentors, over their university break. GSoC strives at promoting the participation of student developers into open source software dev. The full gamut of the application process- starting from choosing a project/organisation based on your technical skill-set to drafting a proposal with deadlines can be time-consuming and requires prior planning (this is assuming that you’re adept with the technical requirements of the project). But it’s totally worth the opportunities, recommendations, connections and stipend that follows :P Do keep a watch for the registered organisations’ list and proposal submission deadlines.
Outreachy
Synonymous with GSoC in quite a few aspects, Outreachy provides a 3 month remote internship twice a year, for members belonging to underrepresented technical groups (including women). A stipend of $5,500 and a travel stipend of $500 ensues the internship. Shubheksha covers the nitty-gritties of the program and highlights her Outreachy journey with Mozilla, here .
Interns work remotely with mentors from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities on projects ranging from programming, user experience, documentation, illustration and graphical design, to data science.
Rails Girls Summer of Code
RGSoC works along the same lines as Outreachy- it’s a 3 month fellowship program for women and non-binary coders. Propagating student scholars in working on Open Source projects, this program has the flexibility of registering as a team and choosing one’s mentor (optional). The program spans from July to September and provides a stipend to the selects. What more, the program is bolstered by coaches, in addition to project mentors! Keep tabs on the applications and projects’ list.
Working in two-person teams, students are supported by a mentor directly involved with the Open Source project, as well as independent coaches with extensive developer experience.
Learn IT, Girl!
A twelve week one-on-one mentorship program, LearnITGirl, works towards achieving Anita Borg’s vision of 50–50 by 2020. In addition to a progressive timeline and super friendly community, girls are encouraged to submit project ideas right from the start. Progress badges, weekly e-mail updates, mentor and mentee tutorials, evals and learning resources characterise this program. You will find this commencing from November, usually. Not to forget the Certificate of Achievement that is awarded to successful mentees!
To sum it up, it’s impossible to beat the ‘I didn’t know’ Syndrome, given that a plethora of technical events and opportunities keep popping up everyday; a viable outlook would be to get yourself involved with technical groups, avail community resources, watch out for updates every month and share away! Note: I’ve focused on a few ventures pertaining to my college experiences. Feel free to add some more links as comments :)
