On Wednesday 13 March 2013 Sumana Harihareswara of The Wikimedia Foundation, Daniel Packer (2011 alumnus), and yours truly (three time alumnus and mentor for the past 2 years) ran an information session organized by yours truly to provide prospective students with information about Google Summer of Code.
Students received a fun and informative presentation on Google Summer of Code basics including mentoring organizations, application and program timeline,
project structure, and all the awesome benefits of Google Summer of Code.
As promised students received swag provided by the Google Open Source Participation Office (including cool shirts, stickers, pens and notebooks). Fresh pizza and cold, refreshing soda was enjoyed by all.
Sumana, Daniel and I fielded questions from the approximately 30 students in attendance (all of whom showed strong interest in the program). The interests of those in attendance was broad and ranged from bioinformatics to computer vision and just about anything in between.
A trail
of links was followed from the Google Summer of Code site to the mentoring organization
site, and then to mentors themselves, with a discussion on how to
approach particular mentors and projects. Students also enjoyed
sending a greeting to the #gsoc IRC channel and receiving replies and
cheers from others in the channel. All in all it was a fantastic
meeting which promised to result in some excited Google Summer of Code applicants.
All in all, I was very pleased with the outcome. Everybody seemed to have a great time.
I would like to thank my professor Stewart Weiss (for his assistance in getting us a room at Hunter College) and the Computer Science department for the pizza and soda! Specific thanks go to Joseph Driscoll, assistant to the department chair whom without his help this would not have happened.
Daniel Packer (2011 Google Summer of Code alumnus) contributed in part to this write-up.
