March 2011 is closing. Pakistan has at-least 150 educational institutes offering computer science and related degrees, where approximately 10,000 students graduate every year.

After 45 days, as summer will be approaching, students will have a plenty of time to do something. Living in a country where opportunities are not as abundant as in the developed world, it is very important for all the students to look for opportunities in the global context.

It is time to explore and pitch for the every possible internship or part time work opportunity  locally and globally that can make best of the time available in the summer period. In the words of Seth Godin “Go. Do that”. And these three words that make you do actions and apply for these programs.

We wanted to focus on our blog about a few important opportunities that Pakistani Students should try to avail during summer of 2011. One of them is

1. Google Summer of Code 2011

According to Google Summer of Code Program “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 organisations 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 time selection of participant organisations is complete, student applications are opening after 4 days on 28th of March 2011. Along with working with the best organisations of the world to sharpen and learn new skills the program offers US $5,000 stipend.
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 right now)

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 top university students have access to the opportunities in Pakistan.

BrightSpyre.com is not associated with Google Summer of Code Program. This post is written as per BrightSpyre’s mission of “Connecting people with opportunities in Pakistan”. Most of the information is referenced from the Google official summer of code program website 2011.
We may not answer any queries on this program but we may frequently post more updates about this or other relevant opportunities on our blog, twitter of facebook page.

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