“Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.” ― Bruce Lee
On one very beautiful morning my friend came to me and started talking about GSoC. Oops :P, I am not a story teller and this is not anyhow a big inspirational story. It’s just my personal experience of working little bit hard and little bit smart than others which ended up with the GSoCers tag with my name. So sharing this experience with all who are interested in applying for GSoC but are not confident enough to do it.
It all started in my first semester at DA-IICT. Before this I was totally unaware of what is GSoC or something like this really exist in the world. Last year 17 students were got selected from our institute and this year the count remained unchanged. (Some students also said that 17 is lucky number for DA. I don’t know the story behind it. :P). I read about it before I took admission at DA and that was felt something excited to me so I was waiting to explore something more about it. And the day came when some students from the institute has arranged an introductory session for GSoC. Obviously, The speakers were those students who managed to get selected for last year. So after this I had enough idea about the GSoC but still few things were unclear to me. But I decided to give it a try and I was waiting for the announcement of program from the Google.
Every year the commencement of the GSoC program starts around March which is the period for organizations to apply for becoming the part of GSoC. Around 200 organizations take part and allow students to contribute for open source world. After this in April the students are allowed to discuss the project ideas with the people form organization through mailing lists( Note: The best way to learn about organization and project is to subscribe for their mailing list.) and IRC chat.
I have gone through so many organizations allowing projects on JavaScript, PHP, JAVA and C/C++. So after lots of searching, reading and communicating I shortlisted three projects from different organization and started exploring about it. How it can be implemented and also compared my capability with the required work because this is very important when you are getting some work as an assignment you must complete it. I have also contacted professor Ajit Rajwade and professor Minal Bhise to help me to decide on which project should I work. And really they have helped me a lot (Heartily thanks to them! :) ). After all these hectic tasks I decided to work on MOST: NoSQL Solution for Building Data Warehouses project of Computational Science and Engineering at TU Wien. The mentors for the project are Harald Hofstätter and Stefan Glawischnig. They are really nice people. They have continuously guided me to make my proposal better.
After Selecting the project I have started learning technologies required for the project. They have also given one small assignment which help them in deciding students capability of work. I have submitted the assignment and meanwhile I was continuously talking to them about my approach and interest in the project. I have started asking questions and getting details related to project. And it was 27th May, 2013 the day of announcing accepted students proposals. I was curiously waiting for the result and as per the Indian time the result was going to be announced at midnight so the whole day was passed with so much curiosity. All the applicants from our institute were on IRC chat and they were also excited as much as I. Finally I received the e-mail from Google and truly speaking I was in shock for a moment and after that I felt like some miracle has happened to me. And lots of greetings and congratulating posts started flashing on my facebook wall.
I will upload my project proposal with next article. Hope you guys enjoyed reading this. Keep visiting and feel free to give suggestions. Have a nice day! :) :)