Preparation for GSOC 2025
Background: I found out about GSOC by chance a few days ago and wanted to apply. I found that such an endeavour requires much more preparation, so I'm now aiming for the 2025 GSOC.
I'm currently facing 2 main barriers in my preparation:
- Learning to code in the required languages
This can be solved with a few online courses on freecodecamp, the Odin project, datacamp etc, so I'm not too concerned.
- Learning about the organisation
This, however, i find personally overwhelming. There are just so many organisations and I find it daunting to figure out how it all works. To be able to create a proposal, I would first need to know how to the organisations' product works (I've not used most of it before though), and then suggest ideas for improvement and come up with a solid detailed execution plan.
But I don't even know where to start as I can't even understand the organisations problem and the ideas list since I lack experience with their softwares(sorry if this sounds a little dumb, I'm a 100% beginner)
Does anyone have advice for how I can select beginner friendly projects and a framework to research about the organisations efficiently? Because I can't be going through all of them and experimenting with their software.
For example, I found a relatively easier project by DeepChem, which involves adding a new tutorial to the DeepChem tutorial series via Jupyter/Colab. But I can't find any way to contribute to the tutorial and write it in my proposal since the tutorial is about Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics which I had never even heard of before and don't know where to start...
Does anyone have advice for how I can find out about the organisations efficiently? I heard there was a timeline for networking with the mentors but when exactly is it? Is it sufficient to do my research then, or must I start way earlier?
Also, if I start contributing to open source regularly this year to gain practice, will I be disqualified since the eligibility criteria says one has to be a beginner?
Thank you very much.