On the 3rd of December, I began a 3-month Outreachy Internship program under Mozilla 🦊. In this blog post, I’ll talk about my experience with the application process of the Outreachy Internship Program. If you do not know what I am talking about, hold tight.

What is Outreachy?

Outreachy is a program that organizes three-month paid internships with free and open-source software projects for people who are typically underrepresented in those projects

Wikipedia

Outreachy provides an opportunity for working in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) under the guidance of an experienced mentor(s) for 3 months. Outreachy internships are not limited to programming only. They also may include user experience, documentation, illustration, graphical design, data science, project marketing, user advocacy, or community event planning.

Outreachy internships are open to applicants around the world. Interns work remotely and are not required to move. Interns are paid a stipend of $5,500 USD, along with $500 USD as a travel stipend to attend conferences or events. This year, the Outreachy program is scheduled from December 2019 to March 2020.

How to get into Outreachy?

I came to know about the Outreachy program through one of my friends (thanks, Leobas 🙏). At first, I found the whole idea too good to be true. I was pretty sure I had no chance of getting the internship (oh hi, impostor syndrome 👋). However, as I had nothing to lose, I started researching about it and read as many articles as I could from motivating outreachy alums. From then on, I began to saw the idea as an incredible opportunity, which I could not miss.

Eligibility

According to the Outreachy website, applicants who are women (both cis and trans), trans men, genderqueer people, residents and nationals of the United States of America of any gender (who are Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, Native American/American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander) are encouraged to apply. That is, anyone who faces systemic bias or discrimination in the technology industry of their country is invited to apply.

Make sure you’re eligible to apply. They have strict eligibility rules for people who are students.

You will need to meet the following requirements:

• You are or will be 18 years of age or older by the day internship round starts
• You have not previously participated in an Outreachy, Outreach Program for Women or Google Summer of Code internship
• You are available for a full-time (40 hours a week) internship
• If you are a student, you must have at least 49 consecutive days free from full-time commitments

In the following, I will describe all the Outreachy application process and how I went through it. The process has three stages mainly.

Initial Application

After creating your account, Outreachy asks you to fill an initial application. This form contains questions about you, your availability, country of residence and some visa and time-zone related questions.

The initial application also includes four essay questions related to the discrimination you face in your academic/work environment. I would say this is perhaps the most important section, so think carefully before you write. You will need time to think through and properly convey your experiences. I spent more than a few days to fill all my form.

In short, this initial step helps to filter applicants who meet the eligibility criteria. As you can imagine, I qualified for the following step 🎉, which I will describe below.

Project Selection

Once the eligibility form has been filled and you’ve been accepted, it’s time for the next stage. We can all agree this is the most crucial step and a bit overwhelming part. Here, interns need to look at the proposed projects and pick 1-2 projects. There will be more information on each community’s landing page, including community chat channels and mentor contact information if you need to ask questions about the projects.

I strongly recommend that you take the time to study the entire list of projects. After reviewing all available projects, write down on a paper on which ones caught your eye. Let’s call this list the initial list. With your initial list ready, it’s time to filter projects by some criteria. In my case, I chose to select all projects that required skills that I would be comfortable with (Python and R languages). So in the end, I ended up with a list of just 3 projects. As my idea was to choose at most 2 projects, I opted for the ones that seemed most interesting to me.

The picture shows one of the projects I chose and what I was selected.

Making Contributions

Chosen the project(s), it’s time to contribute! A contribution is nothing more than accomplishing any project task you choose. Put differently, a contribution can represent something small, like a bug fix or a documentation improvement.

In the project I chose, the candidates made contributions through the project repository. All steps to contribute have been provided in the GitHub repo. The contribution process of this project, especially, was the same as that of another Data Science project. In this case, the candidates should inform the mentors what was the order of preference between the two projects.

The contribution process consisted of two steps:

1. The steps of the initial contribution process were as follows:

• Clone the repository
  • This will download the relevant dataset in initial_contribution
• Load the data into R or Python
• Perform exploratory data analysis
• Perform data cleaning, if necessary
• Primary Task – Answer the following questions:
  • Which single field in dataset.csv best describes the SalePrice field?
  • Why did you choose this field? Please thoroughly explain your reasoning.
• E-mail the final notebook/script to one of the mentors

2. The steps of the second contribution process were as follows:

• Utilize the notebook completed in initial_contribution
• Train a regression model predicting SalePrice from the other fields in dataset.csv
• Primary Task – Answer the following questions:
  • Why did you use the regression model technique you chose?
  • Why did you choose the predictors/covariates/variables you used?
  • How well does your model perform?
    • Do you believe the model overfits or underfits the data?
    • Is there a subset of the data that the model performs better on?
• E-mail the final notebook/script to one of the mentors

At the end of each step, applicants had to register their contributions to the Outreachy website. Remember that you cannot submit a final application until you register at least one contribution. In my case, exactly two contributions were required for the submission of the final application.

Start your contributions early!

During this stage, It’s more important to ask questions and send contributions at a steady pace than try to make a big, last-minute contribution. If possible, start with a smaller contribution then try a more complex contribution. The goal is to show you have the skills to be a successful intern.

After you select a project and have made a contribution, record it on the Outreachy website. In fact, you can record a contribution as soon as you start working on it. On top of that, the website allows us to go back and edit our recorded contribution at any time. Therefore, you don’t have to worry so much.

Once you submit a contribution, your mentor or another community member will review it. They usually have feedback and changes you will need to make. Do not understand it as a critique of your work or skills, but rather as a chance to learn something new and improve your skills.

Be sure to follow all suggestions and feedback from the reviewer, you may need to submit your contribution more than once. Therefore, continue working with your mentor until your contributions are ready to be included in the project.

Final application

Finally, after registering at least one contribution on the Outreachy website, you must create a final application for each project you applied for. The final application asks four questions:

• Experience with this community
• Experience with other communities
• Relevant Projects
• Outreachy internship project timeline

Make sure to complete all the project’s forms at least a day before the deadline, as you can always go back and make any edits.

Intern announcement

Intern selections are not shared with applicants until interns are announced. This is probably the worst & best part of the whole process. Worse, because it is very difficult to contain anxiety waiting for the result. But, it’s best when the result is finally shared and together comes the following news:

Some tips for future aspirants

• Start the application process early. Don’t submit your initial application at the last minute!
• Fill your eligibility form carefully.
• Choose your project wisely, seeking projects with requirements that match your skill level.
• Make as many contributions as you can.
• Keep an eye on your competitors. Try focusing on your skills that could be a differentiator.
• Join the IRC/Slack chat for the project. Introduce yourself to the prospective mentor.
  • Make regular communication with the mentor and other members of the community.
  • Mentors are friendly and patient, and it’s okay to ask questions multiple times.
• Finally, stay positive! Look at the application process as a learning experience and a fantastic opportunity.
• If at first, you don’t succeed, don’t give up! Try again.

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That’s all folks (for now)! I hope you could gather some insights about the Outreachy application process. Feel free to contact me for any further questions. Best of luck to everyone willing to apply! 🙏🏽