We held an information session on Google Summer of Code at Meerut Institute of Engineering and Technology (MIET), in Meerut, India on 18th March 2013. The event was organized by Computer Association (Compass), a joint society of the Computer Science and Information Technology Department at MIET. This is the first event ever held about Google Summer of Code in Meerut. We had an overwhelming response with well over 250 enthusiasts for the session including quite a few faculty members.
2012 Google Summer of Code alumni, Naman Gupta, took the stage and gave a brief introduction on the Google Summer of Code program. The session started with some open source fundamentals and Naman talking about a couple of open source organizations including Crystal Space and KDE that had participated in the program in previous years. He discussed some of the benefits of the Google Summer of Code, giving examples of a few previous students and encouraging students who were afraid of coding but were still interested in the program. Next Naman described version control and gave tips on how to write good code. Naman reinforced that anyone could apply for Google Summer of Code as there are mentoring organizations from a wide range of fields. Naman highlighted the important dates and URL links for the program, some statistics, how to apply, and tips on writing project proposals for the Google Summer of Code.
In the Q&A session most of the students were worried about the difficulty level of the work. Naman responded to this question by telling the students that the work would be difficult but there would be mentors to help them out along the way. He also mentioned some of the challenges that he had faced and how he tackled them during last year’s program. At the end of the session we gave away Google open source items making students very happy. The event was a great success and we hope to see more students from Meerut in the Google Summer of Code program.
By Udit Saini, Compass Board member
Stay tuned for our next Google Summer of Code meetup post next week. Open source organizations are applying to be mentoring organizations for this year’s program now through Friday, March 29th. Participating organizations will be announced on the program site on April 8th.
