Students work hard and learn a great deal during the academic year, but without the right employment opportunities or other pursuits outside of school, technical skills waste rather than get honed and expanded. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, wanted Google to help solve this problem by helping students find work related to their academic pursuits during their school holidays. The Google Summer of Code, also abbreviated as GSoC, is an international annual program in which Google award stipends to students who successfully complete a free and open-source software coding project during the summer.
The program is open to university students aged 18 or/and over. The organizations provide mentors who act as guides through the entire process, from learning about the community to contributing to the code. The idea is to get students involved in and familiar with the open source community and help them to put their summer break to a good use. The accepted students gain exposure to real-world software development and employment opportunities.
The participating organizations are able to identify and bring in new developers. Source codes are created and released for the use and benefit of all. The code produced as part of the program is released under an open source license. This program has brought together thousands of mentors and students mentors from over 118 countries worldwide.
As of November 2019, 686 open source projects, from areas as diverse as operating systems and community services, have participated as mentoring organizations for the program. Successful students have widely announced that their participation in GSoC made them more attractive to potential employers and that the program has helped greatly when embarking on their technical careers.
Goals of the GSoC’s programs-
The GSoC program has several goals:
- This program can be released for the benefit of all and get more open source projects.
- Inspire young developers to participate in open source programs.
- It helps open source projects identify and bring in new developers.
- Provide opportunities to the student to do work related to their academic pursuits during the summer time.
- It gives students more exposure to real-world software development (for example, distributed development and version control, software licensing issues, and mailing list etiquette).
Benefits of applying in GSoC-
- GSoC will give you an amazing learning experience. It is a place where you don’t just get to apply your skills but also get to acquire a bunch of new ideas. The learning is not just limited to technical knowledge. GSoC introduces you to a new pattern about building code collaboratively. Also, GSoC is a platform that lets you build on your current skills and hone them.
- It will strengthen your programming skills. Students who are already involved in the development practices can engage themselves in a specific project. All your work will be monitored and supervised by experts.
- It will build your network. You interact and share ideas with some great people during the 12 weeks of the program. At the end of it, you will make some great friends from all over the world with whom you can discuss and collaborate on fun projects, get feedback on your code.
- The very obvious advantage of participating in GSoC is the stipend that you make while working with amazing people on a great project. Being a successful GSoC student is in fact a reputable achievement. It is one of the ways to make your resume more impressive.
How GSoC works-
Once your project is accepted you are assigned a primary mentor and potentially secondary mentors as well. Consistent access to mentors is one of the most valuable parts of the GSoC program. Your mentor will work with you throughout the GSoC program to help you succeed. You will also get feedback from your mentor which is of utmost valuable.
