GSoC 2025 -- "required skills" assessment

[Sean Lip]

Hi all,

(If you're interested in participating with Oppia for GSoC 2025, the following information will be relevant to you. If not, please feel free to skip this email.)

Thanks for your interest in participating in GSoC 2025 with Oppia! 

This is just a quick (but important) note to let you know about a key part of our selection criteria for 2025 ("required skills"), and how to prepare for it. We wanted to send this early on in the application period so that you have time to look into it if needed, since it's the most important part of our selection process.

This year, one of the main things that we're screening applications on is whether the applicant has the required skills for their chosen project, since the lack of these skills has led to failures in the past. So, for example, if the project requires knowing how to write Beam jobs, we can't accept an applicant who has no experience with Beam jobs, even though their proposal or other contributions might be very good. Note that you only need to show proficiency on the skills that are relevant to your chosen project (as described in the project ideas list).

To get more information on what "demonstrating a skill" means, please check Section 2 of the GSoC 2025 proposal template (page 5). You might also find the footnotes for that table useful, since they offer helpful guidance on how you can develop skills that you don't yet have, as well as links to guided tutorials. (Note: the current tutorials are a best effort, so please feel free to give feedback in this GitHub Discussions channel if they aren't helpful enough -- we do want to help folks learn these key skills, and would be happy to try and improve the tutorials as needed!)

In summary -- please take a moment to look at the skills that are relevant to your chosen project, and see whether you will be able to demonstrate them. If not, we advise trying to address that as a priority, since the "required skills" check is our first round of selection.

If you have any questions about how this works, or would like an org admin to verify that the "required skills" section of your proposal looks good, please feel free to leave a note in the GitHub Discussions Q&A channel.

Hope this is useful, and we wish you the best of luck with your applications!

Thanks,

Sean (for the GSoC org admins)