Doesn't this conflict with internship for students. So, am curious as to which ends up being more valuable to a student a proper Internship or GSoC?
Or, have students done GSoC in parallel with their internships?
Or, have students done GSoC in parallel with their internships?
I don't how many internships Google has but SoC is 1-2k people a year
Google Internships from Google's perspective is people that they may want to hire. Summer of Code the candidates are chosen by the participating organizations so it's a wider range.
That's an American thing. I wonder how many GsoC students are foreign.
Some things I observed from a quick glance through it:
- On most years there's about 1200-ish students from about 60-ish countries.
- There's a disproportionate number of students from India, like far above other countries, even United States.
I did my undergrad from India, and masters program from USA. (I'm now back in India working as a software developer).
At my university in India, we had this sort of club for enthusiast programmers who would contribute to open source software after regular class hours. Each student would pick a major project and contribute to it.
It was fun and we learnt a lot that way. Every year some members of this club would apply for gsoc (with the projects that they had already been contributing to during the months leading upto it), and about a dozen students used to get selected into the program.
Participation in open source was something that was actively promoted there. I couldn't find anything similar during my time in USA, although I only have the data-point of a single US university.
[1] https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/resources/sta...
How else are you supposed to gain work experience? Part time throughout the year?
Plus, like you said, competition. There is a lot more available time for internships if you accept doing them outside of just June - August.