Google Summer of Code 2021: Results announced!

In 2021, our global online program, Google Summer of Code (GSoC), focused on bringing more student developers into open source for 10 weeks from June to August, concluding yesterday, on August 30th with the final mentor evaluations of their students. We are pleased to announce that 1,205 students from 67 countries have successfully completed this year’s program. There were also 199 open source organizations and over 2,100 mentors, from 75 countries, that took part in the program. Congratulations to all students and mentors who completed GSoC 2021!

The final step of each GSoC program is the student and mentor evaluations.These help us gain valuable insights from our participants about the impact of the program. Here are some results from this year’s evaluations:

• 96% of students think that GSoC helped their programming skills
• 99% of students would recommend their GSoC mentors
• 94% of students will continue working with their GSoC organization
• 99% of students plan to continue working on open source
• 36% of students said GSoC has already helped them get a job or internship
• 72% of students said they would consider being a mentor
• 88% of students said they would apply to GSoC again

Evaluations also give students and mentors the opportunity to give suggestions to GSoC program administrators. In past evaluations, a number of students have requested a ‘Student Summit’ in order to help connect their GSoC experience with the wider open source community.

We’re proud to announce that this year we held our first GSoC Student Summit on August 27th. Over 275 students attended the virtual summit! The goal of the Student Summit was to inspire and inform our 2021 students. We included talks from Googlers, GSoC mentors and former students who shared their personal and professional path to GSoC and open source. Students were also able to ask the presenters questions and even participate in trivia games to win prizes! More importantly, the summit was a place and time where students from around the world could come together and celebrate their GSoC accomplishments. Inspired by what they learned from the summit, the students know that while their GSoC time has ended their open source journey has just begun.

By Romina Vicente, Project Coordinator for the Google Open Source Programs Office