It’s no secret that the job market is less than robust right now, and things look especially grim for people who don’t have their feet wedged in some doors. Fortunately, Google Summer of Code 2009 is swooping in to give students all sorts of great opportunities.
At the very least, participants will get t-shirts, figurative gold stars on their resumes, and $4,500 in their bank accounts. At the most, well, some direct job offers are likely to result.
As for what Google Summer of Code is, a post on the Google Code blog explains that it’s “our global program to introduce university students to the wonderful world of Open Source development. For our fifth Summer of Code, students can choose from 150 Free and Open Source software projects, in technical areas as diverse as gaming to humanitarian efforts to operating system design. All accepted students will be paired with a mentor from academia or industry and will receive coaching in all aspects of software development over the course of their three month coding project.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBRRR0BQyz0The student application period began today. It’ll end on Friday, April 3rd, and there should be around 1,000 available slots this year.
Spread the word if you want. Even people who don’t attend Google Summer of Code can benefit from both the human networking and open source software progress that’s sure to occur.
