[Pdx-pm] SOC 2009 - finding students

[Eric Wilhelm]

# from Jonathan Leto
# on Thursday 08 January 2009 18:01:

>It looks like GSOC 2009 is a done deal, time to start looking for
>mentors and students.

Indeed.  I think possibly we need more students.  Is anyone interested 
in becoming the pdx.pm student liaison?

What follows are some thoughts which I just sent to the pm-groups list:

For 2008, we had a great turnout of willing and able mentors, but only 
about 16 student applications.  This implies that we need to try to 
reach more students and encourage them to apply for summer of code this 
year.

We'll probably start to see more information from Google about SOC 2009 
within a month or so.  For now:

  http://tinyurl.com/9r55v3

Last year taught us that the returning organizations which started early 
were more successful in recruiting students.  While we can't say for 
sure that Perl/Parrot will be accepted as mentor organizations, we'll 
get a very late start if we wait.  If it (knock on wood) doesn't 
happen, the Perl community will still benefit from efforts to connect 
with more students.

The following are just a few ideas of what your local Perl Mongers group 
could do to help.  Please forward this to your mailing list or discuss 
it at your next meeting.

Find out if your local university has Perl in the curriculum.  If so, 
get in touch with the professors and let them know about your local 
Perl Mongers group.  Ask if they would be interested in you speaking to 
their class or giving a presentation on-campus.

If the computer science department doesn't seem interested in Perl, you 
might find users (or potential users) in other departments.  Think 
about all of the niche data-crunching for which Perl gets used.  Find 
grad students who might be doing that - whatever their major might be.

Are any members of your group recently graduated?  If so, the contacts 
they still have might be a great place to start, especially in non-cs 
disciplines.  Even in very specialized applications, the chances are 
that the Perl community contains a mentor with a related background.

--Eric
-- 
hobgoblin n 1: (folklore) a small grotesque supernatural creature that
          makes trouble for human beings
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