What if you don't make it?

[Federico Capoano]

Hi everyone,

we do not know how many slots we'll get and I think we're quite fortunate to have a number of good applicants this year, so I am not sure we will receive enough slots.

I can tell you already for sure that the number of good applicants this year is higher than our mentoring capacity.

This means that someone will not make it into getting selected for doing GSoC with us.

For these reasons, I wanted to share some suggestions that I hope are going to be useful to all the applicants.

If you think this would be your last change of participating in GSoC, because next year you will not have this chance, you can do the following to increase your chances of being accepted (other than what you have already been doing, that is, contribute actively):

• apply to and train for more than one project idea
• communicate with the other good GSoC applicants (how to know if an applicant is good? If they're participating actively to the community and their PRs are being reviewed and merged often, they are good) to know what they are applying for and avoid applying for the busiest ideas
• in extreme cases, apply also for another GSoC organization, but this may be hard or pointless if you know nothing about that org

For those ones who are at the beginning of their study journey and think will have a chance to apply again to GSoC with OpenWISP or another organization in the future, my suggestion are the following:

• train for the sake of increasing your skills instead of for the sake of being accepted into GSoC
• if you find OpenWISP interesting, stick with us regardless of GSoC, because there will be other opportunities to do paid collaborations together, since we are intentioned to apply to other Open Source programs which provide paid internships
  
• if you stick with us long enough, in the future you'll be able to apply for any internship or other GSoC org you want, because you'll already have experience and you'll be able to surpass quickly the other candidates

So please consider the possibility that you won't make it and prepare psychologically, because I have seen different times in the past students get really disappointed that they were not selected. Remember it's not personal, there are applicants which have started to contribute and train many months ago and participated actively to initiatives like Hacktoberfest or that have helped us push different releases of OpenWISP. If the number of slots and mentors is limited, it is natural that we select the applicants which have stuck with us long enough to demonstrate their interest in the project and not only in doing GSoC.

For us, this year, one of the most important traits we look for in applicants is the likelihood that they'll stay with us and grow with us: we need more experts to do paid projects with, more maintainers who have a vested interest in maintaining and improving OpenWISP and more mentors who will help us to mentor and train more contributors and future mentors. 

That's why sticking with us or any other open source org is important.
I'm a firm believer of the "compound effect", which we are experiencing now in OpenWISP, after many years of work, results are starting to show exponentially.
Stick with something over a long enough period of time and you'll experience the same compounding exponential results!

Best luck to all
Federico