March 2011 is closing. Pakistan has at-least 150 educational institutes offering computer science and related degrees. After 45 days everyone will have a plenty of time to do something. . Students will start looking for opportunities. A land where opportunities are not as abundant as in the global world; it is very important to look for opportunities in the global context. It is time to explore and pitch for the every opportunity that is avaialble right now. In the words of Seth Godin “Go. Do that”. And these three words makes all the difference.
We wanted to focus on our blog about a few important opportunities that Pakistani Students should try to avail. One of them is
1. Google Summer of Code 2011
According to http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/program/home/google/gsoc2011 “Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects.” In this program along with students Google works with several open source, free software,non profit organizations that are developing software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund projects over a three month period.
Also through this program Students are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects (175 open source projects are selected for 2011, see a complete list of selected organizations here), thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits.
At this stage after the selection of participant organizations, student applications are opening after 4 days on 28th of March 2011. The deadline to apply for students is 8th of April 2011 and complete timeline is available here and very detailed instructions on how to apply for students are available on the Google summer of code program website and can be find out by joining Internet Relay Chat (IRC) (now most of the discussions have moved to IRC channel and is open for everyone to join) or join Google mailing list ( the mailing list is very active)
A few of the Pakistani students have been selected in the past in Google Summer of Code program including Mr. Adnan from Virtual university of Pakistan. This fact also negates the phenomena that only tp university students have access to the opportunities.
BrightSpyre.com is not associated with Google Summer of Code Program. This post is written as according to BrightSpyre’s mission of connecting people with opportunities in Pakistan. Most of the information is taken from the Google official summer of code program website 2011.