Attention Students,
It is time to get ready for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2024! If you are not familiar with GSoC, it is a remote summer internship program where students contribute to open source software projects. GSoC is a great opportunity for graduate and undergraduate students to gain experience developing software and contribute to open source projects. GSoC is an international program, and a great opportunity for students of every background to work with professional software engineers from around the globe. Specific details about this year’s program can be found on the GSoC website. If you are curious about what GSoC looks like at Open Robotics you can find out more about our past programs on the Open Robotics website.
This year the Open-RMF and Gazebo communities will be taking on multiple projects and enhancements, which you can read about here. The application period starts on Monday, 2024-03-18T07:00:00Z , and ends Tuesday, 2024-04-02T07:00:00Z so don’t delay! If you are interested in robotics but don’t see any projects that suit your interests you may also want to consider applying to some of our sibling organizations like OpenCV, MoveIt, and ArduPilot.
Students often ask how they can improve their chances of being accepted to GSoC. We always recommend starting off with a strong application. Other than that here are a few recommendations:
- Familiarize yourself with the project you want to work on. Pull down the latest version, build it from source, and try to do something interesting with it. Try adding a feature or fixing a bug. Many Open Robotics projects have a “Good First Issue” tag. We often select students who are already contributors to our projects as our GSoC students.
- Lend our project maintainers a hand but don’t get over your head. Small pull requests, that address minor issues, are a great way to start! We want to see that you can put together a complete pull request and work well remotely.
- Do cool and interesting stuff and write about it! It doesn’t have to involve ROS or Gazebo, and can be a school project. What we’re looking for is that you have the basics of software development down and that you are working to improve your written communication skills.
- Remember that we’re not looking for perfection. We’re looking for students who work hard, try new things, and learn from their mistakes
One final note, please use the correct channels to talk about GSoC. Questions about GSoC 2024 should be kept on the ROS and Gazebo Discourse forums, the OSRF Discord, or by emailing our mentors directly at gsoc@openrobotics.org.