[Xapian-devel] GSoC student application deadline

[Rishabh Mehrotra]

I am sure these stats are just some numbers which *do not* reflect the
actual scenario any where closely. I completely agree with you on
"*you're really competing against the other candidates which the org would
consider accepting, not against the total number who applied.*"

In my opinion, the project one is applying to would/should be more(way more
IMO) important because even if someone doesn't get selected, his interest
should motivate him to contribute to the project he is really interested in.

Anyways, thanks for sharing the link on *NotesonStudentAllocations*,
provides an insight into the allocation process.

Regards,
Rishabh.

On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 5:30 PM, Olly Betts <olly at survex.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 08, 2012 at 09:31:15PM +0530, Rishabh Mehrotra wrote:
> > Going by the stats, *just for fun*, comparing Xapian to the general GSoC
> > average, last year out of GSoC's overall 5651 proposals, 1115 were
> > selected, that is, 1 in 5. On the other hand, for Xapian, out of 42
> > proposals, 4 were selected: 1 in 10. [The stats doesn't involve students
> > submitting multiple proposals and other such details...]
> > *Verdict:* Its tougher to get into Xapian!
>
> I realise you're not being totally serious, but I'd be cautious about
> trying to draw firm conclusions from the rather limited summary
> statistics available.
>
> On the #gsoc IRC channel, it's common to see prospective students divide
> the number of slots by the number of applicants (or even the number of
> applications) and conclude that the chances of acceptance are much lower
> than they really are.  If they mention this on IRC, someone usually
> reassures them, but I bet a lot more are put off applying, which is a
> shame.
>
> Assuming you wrote an application good enough to get accepted at all
> (if you didn't, your chances are zero), you're really competing against
> the other candidates which the org would consider accepting, not against
> the total number who applied.
>
> If Xapian had enough mentors and slots, and ignoring that we would be
> unlikely to take more than one student for the same project idea (unless
> they take it in different directions), and also that some of those
> students may have been accepted by another org anyway, we'd probably
> have taken 10-15 of the applications from last year.  Not sure yet for
> this year, but it's probably similar.
>
> But without knowing that information for other orgs, it's hard to know
> if it really is much tougher.
>
> > Also, this year some 6685 proposals were submitted to 180 organizations,
> > averaging 37 proposals per organization. We have 41! *Verdict:* Xapian's
> > clearly avg+.
>
> Interesting...
>
> The umbrella orgs like KDE, the Python Software Foundation, GNU, etc
> actually represent a lot of individual projects, and because of this
> they usually get a lot more applications than the non-umbrella orgs, but
> that means you'd expect us to get less than the average.
>
> I know some topics are more popular - I bet more students want to work
> on games than accounting software.  Perhaps search is fairly popular.
> Or perhaps there aren't many other search-related orgs taking part.
>
> > I am sure these stats don't matter at all and these comparisons don't
> mean
> > anything, but still I feel happy whenever I see *"avg+"* : be it academic
> > performance(very rarely! ;) ) or anywhere else.
>
> Indeed - the first cut at slot allocations is apparently based on the
> number of applications received, so applying to a popular org should not
> be a big worry:
>
>
> http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code/wiki/NotesonStudentAllocations
>
> Cheers,
>    Olly
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.xapian.org/pipermail/xapian-devel/attachments/20120409/694fed05/attachment.htm>