Google Summer of Code with Sugar Labs!



Aha! I could not express my feelings on seeing this e-mail. Yeah!, My acceptance into the Google Summer of Code '17 with Sugar Labs received on May 04, 2017.

Hello all,

I am Sanjay Kumar. As many did, I also tend the break the myth that Google Summer of Code is only for students with computer science background. Yes, I am a student of the department of accounting and finance in a private college located at Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. I am a beginner level, self-taught coder being passionate about developing games that could help thousands to learn Vedic maths.

So, let me briefly put the selection process that I went through to get accepted into the program.

Sugar Labs had many cool project ideas posted in their ideas page but I wanted to develop something that was attempted earlier but was not completed successfully. It seems to be little risky to convince the mentors in a highly competitive program like Google Summer of Code with such an attempted idea. So, I decided to prepare a clearly stating and self-explanatory project proposal and then make my initial contact with the mentors. I worked hard in between my class hours to make the visuals and also to crack down the Vedic math tricks in words. I also did not have a good experience in writing such a lengthy document and so I spent more time on iterating through it many times before completion. This is what I could make in the end. 

Then, I have submitted the draft document to the GSoC site but did not receive any comments from the mentors during the application period. It was little disappointing and so I decided to e-mail it the organisation admin knowing that it shall be one among the 100s of e-mails that he will be receiving from my fellow applicants. But to my surprise, he replied. It was motivating to polish my proposal again to make my chances higher and after a long wait, the results were positive.

As many students who participated in GSoC earlier stated in many blog posts and Quora answers, early start and patience is the key for getting accepted into GSoC.

I shall make updates on this blog on my progress after crossing each milestones.

Happy coding!

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