How do You Prepare Yourself for an internship at Google during your 1st year at college?

The answer to the Question “How do You Prepare Yourself for an internship at Google during your first year at college?” is given by one of my great programmer friend, Please read it completely before coming to any result.

👩‍🏫Answer —

This question is funny, but you being a sophomore I can understand your drive to ask this question. You may not like what you hear, and I am not going to give you a plan, because there is none.

If programming excites you and you try to solve problems by code, you are a quick learner, you can listen to other people and healthily take criticism, and you have a good chance for GSoC.

But one very important thing to understand here is, that not every good programmer gets selected and the ones who get selected, not all are great programmers.

First, understand that Google Summer of Code is a remote internship in an open source organization that is sponsored by Google. Like any internship the person who gets selected is the one whom the people of that organization deem to be a good fit for the project at hand. The decision depends on one or two persons usually, so there are a lot of dynamics here in play. Even bad communication skills can be a reason, doesn’t matters if you write great code.

So my first advice, stop chasing GSoC. Don’t make it JEE, where you start preparing months in advance. It’s just stupid and will make you feel bad if you don’t get selected. This is not the attitude of a good engineer or a good hacker.

Many good programmers I know didn’t get selected. Many of them did. But there are no common grounds on which you can say why one did or why the other didn’t.

The real spirit of GSoC is to become a good open source contributor. If you can imbibe that in yourself, with whatever next projects or problems you attack with your code, not only will you stand a high chance of getting selected for GSoC but later in life, many good opportunities will open up for you. And by good opportunities, I mean primarily working with smart people. The reason is simple, open source contribution takes certain skills plus discipline, you enter an environment where your ego is crushed again and again because the code speaks for itself. It’s very easy to end an argument, either it works or it doesn’t, or your code is faster/more robust than mine. No BS.

If your code is not readable, then no one will care for it. If your code is beautiful, people will go crazy for you, some may even start worshipping you. That is the kind of land of open source, where the best not only survives but thrives, and is appreciated and respected. And once you have lived here, you will end up becoming a programmer who follows good practices and can communicate his ideas well, which is very very very important when working in teams. So I hope you understand why Google spending millions of dollars on GSoC makes sense.

So stay calm and keep coding :p Keep challenging yourself with better projects. Code something which is useful and shares it with the world, no matter if a solution already exists, because you are learning. Don’t find a tutorial, use the documentation, they are your real friends who will be there for a long time. Use git everywhere. Even to write your blog. It’s a very smart and powerful tool. Try communicating with other developers across the globe. Contribute to projects you like on Github. Even if it is a contribution to improving a grammatical error in documentation, it’s a good start. Collaborate with others on code. If you have a problem with something, improve that code.

You have a few months before the next GSoC, just keep learning and improving yourself. Stop worrying or chasing it now. The right time is one or two months before the list of selected organizations is declared. Then you should focus on it. Till then code some good projects, even the “cool” ones :)

🤩Conclusion: —

Start contributing to open source a lot. Most of the OS community is very friendly towards beginners who want to learn but don’t expect to be spoon-fed. Here are some tips:-

Get good in one language at least, and see what all organizations are using them to build something. Don’t waste time learning the “hipster” stuff, get your basic logic and coding skills in place after that it’s like LEGO: putting the blocks together.

Ignore your college lab programs as they are the *worst* possible way to judge somebody’s coding skill (Spoiler: I sucked at all of them…). Contributing to upstream repositories will not only greatly increase your coding skills but will also give you a feel of how production code is supposed to be, how tests etc are written and will improve your communication/writing skills as well.

Wohooo!!

Clap 50 times if you get this advice carefully bros🙌🙌🙌, Don’t worry you will get whatever you want just do one thing that is FOCUS 🤐