Community Highlight: Outreachy Interns 2020
Earlier this year, Oppia was fortunate enough to have had a chance to work with Danial, Yamama, and Mariana — all of whom were fantastic interns with us through the Outreachy program. They started in December 2019 and wrapped up their internships just this past March.
What is Outreachy?
Outreachy is a program that provides internships to work in open source. It is open to applicants around the world, so interns can work remotely — our three interns are spread across the globe and live in Finland, Brazil and Palestine! And yes, this type of internship does pay a stipend for 13 weeks of work.
Applicants range from students to moms getting back into tech, to professionals looking for a career change. Outreachy is keen on inclusivity and takes special pride in supporting minority groups who are underrepresented in tech. In fact, the initial application expressly encourages personal stories of systemic bias or discrimination faced by applicants when applying for a tech job or building tech skills.
Much like other open source programs, applicants have the benefit of working with a mentor from the open source community. Diana and Nithesh have been busy mentoring and supporting our Outreachy interns achieve success in their respective projects.
Oppia’s projects
So what have our Outreachy interns been working on? Danial has been implementing a marketing strategy with the goal of increasing the number of users who land on the Oppia platform. To this end, he is working to improve SEO, change the design and layout of landing pages and investigate the impact of these changes on traffic to the website.
Yamama has been conducting user studies with students in refugee camps in the city of Nablus, Palestine. The goal was to introduce and teach Oppia’s lessons to students and analyze the results and effectiveness of the methods used. She is writing up a plan that will be used as a basis that others can follow to conduct similar studies in other areas of the world.
And finally, Mariana has been improving the frontend test coverage of services. She worked on issues related to Oppia’s coverage reporting tools, increased coverage of various services and also reviewed tests written by other contributors.
Interested in applying?
Outreachy has two internship periods in a year — May to August, and December to March — and initial applications open approximately three months prior to the start of an internship. While it’s too late to apply for the May-August period, keep an eye out for the next round of applications towards late summer (August)! Once an initial application is approved, the Contribution phase begins.
The Contribution period is where applicants look through the list of participating open source organizations and their projects and narrow down their interest to a few (Outreachy recommends you don’t apply to more than two projects). Applicants reach out to the mentors listed in the project descriptions and start contributing — bug fixes, documentation improvement etc. — with the goal of proving they have the skills required to be an intern for the organization.
Every time a contribution is made, applicants record it on the Outreachy website. Finally, applicants make a final application to the projects they are interested in. Mentors evaluate the applicants based on the quality of their contributions.
Tips
- Reach out and ask questions on the public community forums. Open source is all about collaborating together!
- Contribute early and often — don’t wait to make a complex contribution right at the end. While an applicant is only required to make one contribution during the contribution phase, a stronger application consists of multiple contributions.
- Consider applying to Google Summer of Code, this increases your chances of being accepted as an Outreachy intern.
- Don’t let intimidation or ‘impostor syndrome’ stop you from jumping in and contributing. Be open and ready to make mistakes and grow — you will find the community really supportive!
