My journey of Google Summer of Code 2018
What is Google Summer Of Code?
Google Summer of Code, often abbreviated as GSoC, is an annual international program for university students above the age of 18. The program invites students who meet their eligibility criteria to post at most 3 applications that detail the software-coding project they wish to work on. These applications are then evaluated by the corresponding mentoring organization. Every participating organization must provide mentors for each of the project ideas received.
The mentors then rank the applications and shortlist the proposals to accept.
Google decides how many projects each organization gets, taking into account the number of applications the organization received.
Open source organisations come from several fields of computer science like Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Software Development, Web Development etc. Some of the organisations are Ubuntu, Ardupilot, FOSSASIA, JdeRobot etc.
The short journey to GSoC 2018
My journey for searching GSoC organisations started in late-September 2017. Having worked on artificial intelligence projects before, I started searching for organisations related to AI and robotics. Out of 4 such organisations one was JdeRobot- Universidad Rey Juan Carlos.
JdeRobot is an open source distributed software framework for developing robotics and computer vision applications. After trying out the software of the JdeRobot Academy and Robotics Club, I started researching on their open-source software. The organisation had many such projects under GSoC 2018.
In order to submit a proposal, it was mandatory to complete 3 programming challenges and have knowledge of some mentioned prerequisites with the project. By February 12th, the list of accepted organizations was published by Google and JdeRobot was one of them.
Students were allotted time to discuss project ideas with the mentoring organizations. After completing the programming challenges, I discussed details related to the proposal through emails. March 12th to March 27th was the period to submit proposals for the project to Google. With support from mentors from the organization, I prepared my proposal and submitted it on March 23rd.
April 23rd, 21:30 IST was the exact time when the acceptance mail from Google showed up in my inbox stating that my proposal got shortlisted under GSoC 2018. I was to be the first and only student to be selected for Google Summer Of Code at SRM Institute of Science and Technology! I worked with JdeRobot on the project VisualStates. You can read about the details of the project here.
GSoC is a great opportunity for undergraduate students to get a taste of how software is written in the open-source world and a valuable experience for programmers in general. Besides that, there’s a pretty good stipend and Google goodies associated with it.
In my experience, I noted that GSoC gives an equal opportunity to students from various different backgrounds, unlike most programming internships that require students to be from a Computer Science background. My advice to all the aspiring students would be to start preparing for it from winter by getting acquainted with various communities and their codebases. This can go a long way in helping one write a good proposal and get selected.
Pushkal Katara is a member of Minsky lab at Next Tech Lab. Minsky lab members research on artificial intelligence.
