This summer I will intern under the Outreachy internship program. It is a three-month long paid internship in which every student will have their own mentor and work on some Free and Open Source software. This post describes my experience applying to the program.

How I came to know about the internship

This summer I will work under the mentorship of Gabriel Scherer (@gasche) on extending a random test generator and integrating it with a reference interpreter to test the OCaml compilers. I have been a big fan of OCaml, a strongly-typed functional programming language for quite some time now. When I read about the internship on the OCaml discussion forum, I was very excited about working with OCaml. There are, however, plenty of other FOSS projects with Mozilla, Linux, etc. to choose from in the program.

Outreachy application process

As I mentioned above, there are plenty of projects that you can choose to work on during the internship. I went to the Outreachy website to learn more about the program and the project. The latter will include quite a detailed description of what you will be doing during the internship and how to get started with contributing to the project.

The application process is well-thought and quite easy. It consists of two parts: filling in the application on the website and making your first contribution to the project. For the application, you need to answer a couple of straightforward questions and recall some personal or professional stories. You also need to make a contribution to the project you want to work on. Fortunately, my now mentor, Gabriel, picked simple but interesting tasks for everyone who wanted to apply for this internship. I started by contributing to the official OCaml manual by writing a chapter on lazy evaluation (a topic that I loved even before writing about it). Getting started was a little daunting at first, but when you figure it out, the whole experience is very pleasant. The whole project’s community along with Gabriel were eager to help with my initial contributions!

Beware, you may get very excited about contributions when they get accepted. This happened to me, at least! I did several pull requests with refactors, changes to build systems, etc. You need to indicate all those contributions on the Outreachy website.

All in all, the application process is quite easy and very interesting. I would recommend everyone qualified to apply. It is very important just to get started! Ping me on social networks if you have any questions or need help! 🙂