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R GSOC FAQ
Please use public comments for things that you want the student to respond to.
Use private comments for everything else.
Google holds final say in granting projects, and program rules require that only Google can tell students if/when they’ve been accepted/rejected.
As such, please use private comments, not visible to the student, to discuss acceptance/rejection of projects, or your desires for one proposal over another.
Google also requires that student proposals be independent, so please don’t reference other student proposals in public comments. Comparing two proposals is, of course, perfectly appropriate in private comments.
The student proposal period ends this Friday. Ideally, questions that should be answered by the students will be asked in public comments before the application period closes.
We will be able to choose to request additional information from students for up to two weeks, until slots are awarded, but we want to encourage both students and mentors to have their proposals complete, if possible, by the application deadline.
This deadline is simply a suggestion for mentors to post their project ideas well before the Google deadline, so students can begin work on tests and submit them to mentors, and then after that still have enough time to write an application and submit it to Google. During time between the mentor “soft deadline” for project proposals and the beginning of student applications, mentors can still add projects, but the earlier the project is posted, the more likely you are to find a capable student.
After the hard deadline for student applications to Google, mentors and org admins will rate all student applications. Google will assign us funding for a certain number of students, and only the top projects will be funded.
After a mentor has written a project idea, how much time should he/she expect to spend reviewing potential students?
If you write a good project test then you should be able to quickly figure out which student (if several apply for your project) is the best. Once you find the best student, you should probably spend a few hours reading and suggesting improvements to the application that he/she writes and will submit to Google.
What is the amount of time that mentors are expected to invest on students during the 3 months of coding?
You will need to allocate at least 1 hour a week for a skype call + the amount of time it takes to respond to students questions via email. For the student to be successful he/she will need you to be responsive to his/her questions. As a mentor it is your responsibility to only accept students that you will be able to adequately mentor. So a mentor who does not have much time must only accept a very autonomous students who does not need much more guidance than the weekly skype call, and a mentor with more time may be willing to accept a less autonomous student.
It depends on the project idea. For my Animint project I had an application from Carson Sievert, who was clearly an ideal student, so I had to turn down a couple of other applicants. However some other projects never got any students who applied.
You should clearly define what you expect from your students in the “test” part of your project idea. In my experience the best students will build on your project proposal and add their own ideas. For example Carson Sievert worked on my Animint package last summer, implementing facets and a bunch of other things that I suggested, and then he went on to implement shiny/Rmd integration which was not at all on my TODO list, and he did a great job pretty much without my guidance.
Yes if all the students that apply are clearly not good enough (or not autonomous enough), you should not accept them. However the R project regularly gets more slots than we can use from Google, so it may be worth it to take a chance on a student that you are unsure about.
Keep in mind that the main purpose of GSOC is to teach the students about open-source R package development, and that advancing your particular project is of secondary concern.
Also keep in mind that a student must apply to a mentor (to demonstrate that he/she is a good match for the project) and then to Google with a specific project proposal.
No. Students should pick one project and spend time creating a really good application for that project.
There is no mentor-only forum but you can get in touch with other mentors (as well as students) via the gsoc-r google group.
There can certainly be more than one student per R package, as long as the students are working on different aspects of the package, and that this is clearly reflected in their project proposals. However, if there is a lack of slots available from Google, we will prefer to allocate them 1 for each R package. In that case, mentors may have to make a choice between two (or more) good students.