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How I got selected for GSoC'19:
I will describe my journey from detail i.e from the 1st year of the college. I joined my college back in 2017 (July), I was not even aware of Computer Science. What are the different languages of CS, but I had a strong intuition of doing BTech from CSE only?

So yeah I was totally unaware of the computer science stuff, but I had a strong desire to learn it and I literally don’t know why I had this desire. After getting into college, I was learning HTML, Python, and C, also I am really thankful to my friends who really helped me to learn, building logic and making stuff out of it. During the 1st month of joining the college, I got to know what is Open Source, GSoC, Github due to my helpful seniors. But I was not into Open Source during my 1st year of college as I thought it is very difficult to start. In my 1st year, I used to do competitive programming and writing scripts in Python to automate various stuff. I never thought that I would even start doing Open Source development, also in the summer vacations after the 1st year I used to practice programming on HackerRank and learnt an awesome course called Automate the Boring Stuff with Python(which I think is one of the most popular courses for Python) which really helped me to build by Python skills.

Now the 2nd year came, I was totally confused between doing Open Source development or continue with my Competitive programming. But I wanted to know about Open Source development, so I thought to start now will be a good idea. I started attending meetups of OSDC(Open Source Developers Club) which is a hub of my college, which really helped me to know more about Open Source development from my seniors. I started looking for beginner friendly projects in Python on the website Up For Grabs, it’s really helpful for the beginners. So I contributed in a few of them, and in starting it was really tough for me but yeah I continued, which really helped me to at least dive into Open Source. Now I thought to start contributing in any bigger project, which has millions of lines of code which will be really interesting. So I started looking for the project, as I was into web development those days so I thought to find a project which matches my domain. So yeah I finally landed on Oppia:
Oppia

I started contributing into Oppia in November, so yeah in starting it was really difficult for me to solve any issue (as I wasn’t aware of the codebase which was really big), but yeah mentors at Oppia are really helpful, they guided me which really helped me to start my journey with Oppia. By starting of January I was able to resolve around 3–4 issues, which helped me to become the collaborator at Oppia, afterward I really liked contributing to it and I was able to resolve around 9–10 issues by the end of February, which landed me to become a Team Member at Oppia which was really a confidence boost and indication for me that I am in the right direction.

Also in February, the GSoC organizations list was out, and yeah Oppia was also participating in it. The project ideas of Oppia were really interesting, I became even confused to pick anyone because there were 4–5 ideas which seemed interesting to me. After 1–2 days of thought process I decided to go for one of them, i.e “Asking students why they picked a particular answer”, a full stack project.

I started making proposals on it, from the first week of March. I used to get my proposal reviewed frequently from the mentors, which really helped me to build a good and strong proposal.

I must say a well-defined proposal is the most important key for getting selected in GSoC, also you must have done some contributions to the organization earlier which I think really maximize your chances of selection in GSoC.

So after my proposal was made, I submitted it on the GSoC website.
Result Day:

It was the result day, by the way, I had the confidence of being selected, but yeah I was a little bit nervous. All my friends were asking when is your result coming, I told them it will come at 12.30AM (IST). Finally, the time came when I refreshed the GSoC website, Voila the results were out. I opened the Oppia organization page, and yeah my name was there. That was the day I was really happy and satisfied, I was thinking like I have achieved something in my life. It was a moment of pleasure for me, I called my parents and told them my result, they were really happy for me.

I say cracking GSoC is worth it, the preparation you do, the contributions you do, the making of the proposal is really worth.

I got so many messages from my juniors, friends, and seniors, they congratulated me. After that when I uploaded my result of Facebook and LinkedIn, there were tons of comments and likes on the post. So yeah that’s my journey.

By the way, I am writing this post after really late, sorry for it. I must have done it earlier, but due to milestone 1 of GSoC, I was busy.