Google Summer of Code: The students become the teachers

Over the last few weeks we have been posting a collection of numbers on this year’s Google Summer of Code program. Our last post focused on the students that have participated in the program for multiple years. Now we’d like to look at the number of past students who return to participate as mentors in the program. The numbers clearly indicate that many students become active contributors in various open source communities after their projects conclude; in Google Summer of Code terms we could call this transition graduation.

Some numbers on the student to mentor transition to consider:

• 61 current mentors participated as students last year and for 37 of that group, 2011 was their first Google Summer of Code experience. 
• 131 of this year’s mentors have worked on their own student projects in at least one past Google Summer of Code. 

This is a very respectable result and shows that more than 11.5% of this year's 1,121 mentors with assigned projects have experienced the program from both perspectives.

Below is a detailed table showing how many former students, who participated in particular editions of the program, are currently mentoring a project for Google Summer of Code 2012.

Student 2009	Student 2010	Student 2011	Mentor 2012
		X	X	37
	X		X	29
X			X	29
	X	X	X	17
X		X	X	1
X	X		X	12
X	X	X	X	6

The table shows that 95 of the mentors participated as students only once; 30 more became mentors having worked on two student projects. There were 6 students who converted to mentorship after three consecutive years as students. These numbers also show that for a large number of students Google Summer of Code is not a one-time adventure. There are many who return to implement new projects by themselves or to give a hand to other students and mentor their work. Let’s hope this trend will continue for as long as the program continues to run!

By Daniel Hans, Google, Melange Developer

Important note: all the statistics are calculated based on data gathered since 2009. Previous editions are not taken into consideration.