Last week, I started interning for the Tensorflow project through Outreachy for the Dec 21-March 22 cohort and I couldn't have a better ending for this year🎉. This blog is the first of a series of blogs that I'm required to write over the course of my 3-month internship. In this blog, I will talk a bit about myself and my journey and motivations in landing this internship.
A typical being called Shamima
Hello, I'm Shamima from Bangladesh. My journey in tech started in the traditional way, I studied Computer Science in my hometown and finished this June 2021. These days I love researching new applications of ML for the greater good, making silly demos, and talking to people about their life and experiences. I kid you not that my favorite pastime is reading anime character analysis on the web and watching movie directors' and architects' interviews about their thought processes.
I did find the computer science discipline intriguing at first before starting but really loved the broad applications that the field has in many other disciplines. This is the aspect that I found intriguing as I value curiosity most. I love exploring a lot of different things. I'll delightfully listen to 5-10 random things before breakfast. Owing to this nature of mine, I often like exploring and knowing things to the core. Besides, knowledge in itself is useless if it's not applied so I truly believe in trying for something sincerely. No matter the outcome, someone who tries sincerely to achieve anything is always at an advantage over someone who doesn't even take the first step. Finally, I believe you should always strive to put your work for a higher purpose than just earning bread for your own self. That's a path that I follow to give my life a sense of purpose 😊.
What is Outreachy
For those of you who are new to Outreachy or don't know what that is, don't worry I got you. Outreachy is an awesome, remote 3-month internship program run twice a year. It's an awesome community that invites both cis and trans women, men regardless of their ethnicity, gender, and social background. The perks are that it's fully remote, paid and interns experience working for real-world projects by contributing to Open Source projects.
How does one become an Outreachy Intern and perks
The internship has an intriguing application process for selecting interns which is of two rounds.
Initial applications
The application process is more involved and time-consuming than most other internships. Prior to the start of either of the two rounds i.e May-August or Dec-March round, there's an initial application that would ask for your basic information, some essay questions, and time commitments. The essay questions are a bit detailed and would ask you to share your personal experiences in the topics including bias, discrimination, etc related to your work or field that you faced. Be honest about your experiences and give personal experiences as examples other than statistical figures like 80% women in tech face some kind of bias etc. Then based upon the information you provided and your time commitments, they will select you for the contribution period.
Contribution period
Given that your initial application was approved you will then move to the contribution period. This was the most fun and highlighting part of the internship that I found unique. You will be given a list of participating open source projects that are willing to take interns for that round. During a period of 1 month, you have to select a project of your liking and record at least one in-progress or completed contribution. Then after the contribution period is over they will take another few weeks to select interns for the actual internship. Some words of advice from a once failed but eventually accepted intern (that's me):
Please make sure that your time commitments are in alignment with the actual internship period, a lot of initial applications get rejected simply because the applicants time commits don't match with that of the program
You don't have to be an expert at anything to contribute to a project for the initial round. The projects a range of varying requirements with extremely helpful mentors who will be very supportive and guide you for contributing to their project.
To maximize your chances of getting selected, choose 1 or max 2 projects that you would like to contribute to.
It may be tempting to view this as a competition but trust me you will get much out of it if you think otherwise.
The contributions are a win-win for both the applicants and the open-source projects. More contributions in a project mean it thrives more through your support and even if you end up not getting selected you will have a month of experience of contributing to an open source project which is considered as a real-world experience, practical knowledge of getting around a codebase, and maybe merged pull requests in your resume to show off 🥰. I kid you not, that's what I had listed as experience in my resume when I was first job searching and did not end up being an intern back in Dec 2019 when I applied. A lot of recruiters that contacted me appreciated my contributions to Open Source projects.
Please visit the Outreachy site for more Details and FAQs
That's all folks! 👋