Applying for OPW: my experience

This is the first and introductory post to the blog. Main purpose of it to “break the ice” of empty page and write something about OPW 2014.

Note: You can read what is OPW here – OutreachProgramForWoman.

In this post I want to give some tips for future applicants. It is the summary of my experience for applying and getting the internship.

don’t think you have no time to apply

I managed to select an organization, write project proposal for it, do the required contribution (even two of them) in six days.

So don’t panic, if you like me learn about existance of this program the week before the deadline. It was just like boom! – if you want to participate, there is no time to loose.

don’t be silent

If you are from that kind of people, that just enters any room and gets everyone’s attention and you even enjoy this, free to skip this item. All above is not about me – I’m shy and self-inconfident and I know this. But also I know, that doesn’t mean that I should be silent. So I force myself to ask question, answer other’s question, just post random smiles from time to time. Of course, first several messages are usually like

Hey, I’m completely unsure, but it seems like …

For some unknown reason, I don’t know the answer yet, so may I ask the question…

After extremely friendly answers, all this boilerplate unsureness desappeares, and — hey, I managed to speak to complete strangers :)

about finding the project

There should be some clever advises about how to select the project etc. If you need some, there are really good post. But I was so lucky to skip it all (and I definetely have no time). For me it was like

• filter list of participating organizations for use of Python
• hey, there is OpenStack
• write to general IRC #openstack-opw
• meet aggressively friendly mentor from OpenStack/Marconi flaper87, who just literally pushes me to #openstack-marconi. And the whole Marconi was so aggressively friendly and so ignorant of my shyness, so it was impossible to leave them.
• done :).

getting the internship is not the most important

The most important is that contribution you do, people you talk, task solved. In the end, it was completly irrelevant, would I get those internship or not. Because main outcome I got – experience of contributing to big open-source project and confidence that I will contunue to contribute in future.