Outreachy Blog: Starting as an Intern
In the 2nd week of May, I was selected as an Outreachy intern for the Wikimedia Foundation.
I couldn’t get time to write my first blog as Outreachy Intern as I was busy with my exams. Now, that my exams are over I’m writing this blog.
In this blog, I’ll cover the following:
What is outreachy?
How i applied for Outreachy?
What makes a strong applicant for outreachy?
What is Outreachy?
As mentioned on the Outreachy website, Outreachy provides three-month internships to work in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).
Interns are paid a stipend of $5,500 and have a $500 travel stipend available to them. Outreachy internship projects may include programming, user experience, documentation, illustration, and graphic design, or data science.
Outreachy applications are open to traditionally underrepresented in tech community. All details about who are applicable to apply are mentioned on their website.
How I applied for Outreachy?
I came to know about Outreachy last year through my brother, who is currently working as a data engineer at Gojek.
Last year I wanted to apply for Outreachy, but at that time I was applying for Rails Girls Summer of Code(RGSoC) which is a similar summer internship program. So I signed up for mailing list so as to get notified for the next Outreachy round. You can signup for their mailing list here.
Last year I went through a list of projects and i liked The Wiki Education Dashboard as during that I was learning Front-End technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript through FreeCodeCamp were I finished over 250+ tasks. This really helped me with starting to contribute to open source.
I started contributing to the project last year, but couldn’t apply for it as I wanted to focus on my RGSoC application. Unfortunately, I was not selected as an intern for RGSoC. This gave me a lot of information about how to create proposals and apply for remote internship programs.
This year, even before the applications started, I started contributing to the project and asking relevant doubts on Wiki Eduction slack. I asked doubts about Outreachy and general doubts about the project. I found everyone to be quite welcoming and helpful. They helped me a lot during the application process and also gave constructive feedback on my application.
Thankfully, this time I was able to submit my proposal before the deadline. Also, I used the time between application submissions and intern announcement to continue contributing and made a few fixes to the codebase.
When the interns were announced, I was very nervous to check the results page. Instead of searching my name through Ctrl + f, I was scrolling through the page trying to find my name. I was scrolling and scrolling but was not able to find my name. At last, my name was mentioned in the last project, because the list was sorted alphabetically based on organization name, my project was mentioned at the end.
I am excited to work on the project and look forward to learning new things as part of my internship program.
What makes a strong applicant for outreachy?
The first thing that one needs to do is to get more hands-on experience with skillsets required for outreachy projects. Outreachy website lists the skillsets required for their projects here. So pick up these skillsets and get more hands-on experience with these skillsets.
I am sharing a few resources which I found to be useful:
http://freecodecamp.org (for frontend technologies)
https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-python (for learning python)
https://www.learn-c.org/ (for learning C language)
The second part is picking up a good project that matches your skillsets. For this, I would recommend going through all listed projects and find few projects that match your skillsets.
The third thing is to start making contributions to the project that you want to work on. The more the number of contributions, you will get a better understanding of the project.
Keep in touch with the assigned mentor in case you have any doubt about the project. Keep the mentor informed if you are facing any roadblocks with implementing something. Also, be patient as the mentor would be getting requests from so many applicants. Wait patiently for the mentor’s reply.
The final thing is to make a strong proposal. For this, try to understand the project requirements from the description given in the project listing. Try to come up with a timeline of how you would be delivering these requirements. After this, discuss these timelines with the mentor and ask them for their feedback and suggestions.
I hope that my blog with serve as a good starting point for anyone who is looking to apply for outreachy.
Look forward to suggestions/comments.
