[Xapian-devel] GSoC student application deadline

[Olly Betts]

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