GSoC Experience Series
InterMine is an open source data warehouse for biological data. In 2017, we decided at short-ish notice to participate in a call from Open Genome Informatics for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) mentoring organisations. InterMine had never participated in a program like this before, and we weren’t entirely sure if the time investment was actually going to be worth it. We nervously said “no more than two projects”, but we had so many great applications, we ended up taking on five brilliant students.
Fast forward to 2019, GSoC is firmly embedded in our organisation it’s hard to imagine that this is only our third time participating. The benefits to us (and hopefully the students as well!) were immeasurable, allowing us to explore open-ended projects we thought might be fun and implement concrete ideas that we’ve been wanting to do for years, all while interacting with a really smart bunch of talented students. From the 2017 cohort of students, we ended up with one of our students, Konstantinos Krytsis, authoring a scientific paper about the work they did: InterMineR: an R package for InterMine databases. Another student, Nadia Yudina, returned to our org as a mentor the next year.
In 2018, student engagement got even better: of six students, Adrián Rodríguez-Bazaga applied for an internal vacancy and joined us full time, Nupur Gunwant spent her next summer break working on an internship in our office, and two students returned as mentors the next year (Aman Dwivedi and Arunan Sugunakumar).
By this point, any questions we might have had about whether or not GSoC was “worth it” were firmly answered: GSoC had become an integral part of our team’s operations. There were still things we needed to improve, though—we ran a student debrief after GSoC 2018, and one student expressed that despite having worked with our API and data for three months, they still didn’t have a firm idea of why or how someone might wish to use InterMine. 😱 whoops! This definitely had never been our intent, and I felt mortified that we’d overlooked something so basic.
In 2019, we set out to provide our students with a firm grounding by running cohort calls. All students were invited, giving them the chance to meet one another and interact—not quite face to face, but video calls still give a great sense of “group” compared to just text chat. We structured the calls to run over several months, liberally borrowing from the Mozilla Open Leaders curriculum to teach students about open source good practices, presentation skills, code review, providing effective and kind feedback (an essential part of code review), and of course—talking about what InterMine is, how it was founded, and what type of people might use it. We made heavy use of Zoom’s breakout room feature, to allow small sub-groups of students and mentors to have private discussions about topics, before re-convening to report their experiences to the group.
Feedback from students was very positive about the calls, so we expect to continue this in later years. I think my favourite comment after our very first call was “Are there going to be more of these group calls? This was awesome!” We also repeatedly had the group calls mentioned positively in free-text feedback from student evaluations.
With this in mind, we’d like to share our call agenda templates with other organisations so others can run the same student cohort calls if they wish,and remix/modify, etc. as needed. As part of our GSoC site repo, all content including our call templates, GSoC grading criteria and advice, etc. is Apache licensed and open for reuse. You can see all of our call templates on our GSoC repo site, or fork our GSoC GitHub repo;and I’m happy to discuss ideas (email: yo@intermine.org, twitter: @yoyehudi or @intermineorg) or help others get similar group call programs off the ground if you’d like advice.
By this point, any questions we might have had about whether or not GSoC was “worth it” were firmly answered: GSoC had become an integral part of our team’s operations. There were still things we needed to improve, though—we ran a student debrief after GSoC 2018, and one student expressed that despite having worked with our API and data for three months, they still didn’t have a firm idea of why or how someone might wish to use InterMine. 😱 whoops! This definitely had never been our intent, and I felt mortified that we’d overlooked something so basic.
In 2019, we set out to provide our students with a firm grounding by running cohort calls. All students were invited, giving them the chance to meet one another and interact—not quite face to face, but video calls still give a great sense of “group” compared to just text chat. We structured the calls to run over several months, liberally borrowing from the Mozilla Open Leaders curriculum to teach students about open source good practices, presentation skills, code review, providing effective and kind feedback (an essential part of code review), and of course—talking about what InterMine is, how it was founded, and what type of people might use it. We made heavy use of Zoom’s breakout room feature, to allow small sub-groups of students and mentors to have private discussions about topics, before re-convening to report their experiences to the group.
Feedback from students was very positive about the calls, so we expect to continue this in later years. I think my favourite comment after our very first call was “Are there going to be more of these group calls? This was awesome!” We also repeatedly had the group calls mentioned positively in free-text feedback from student evaluations.
With this in mind, we’d like to share our call agenda templates with other organisations so others can run the same student cohort calls if they wish,and remix/modify, etc. as needed. As part of our GSoC site repo, all content including our call templates, GSoC grading criteria and advice, etc. is Apache licensed and open for reuse. You can see all of our call templates on our GSoC repo site, or fork our GSoC GitHub repo;and I’m happy to discuss ideas (email: yo@intermine.org, twitter: @yoyehudi or @intermineorg) or help others get similar group call programs off the ground if you’d like advice.
