[Project-ideas] GSoC Project question

[Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay]

On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Abhranil Das <abhranildas at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I am Abhranil Das, a fourth year student of an Integrated Masters in Physics
> at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata. I have
> been reading up the project ideas at Ankur for some time now, and I am
> interested to participate in a project with the group under Google Summer of
> Code 2012. I sent Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay this e-mail yesterday prior to
> starting a discussion on the mailing list, but I haven't got a reply yet.
> Well, it's a weekend, so I didn't really expect a quick reply, but there's
> not a lot of time left for GSoC so I got a little panicky and decided to
> repost the e-mail to the mailing list.

Thank you for posting this to the list. The delay in response is more
to do with my travel(s) and desynchronosis than a weekend.

[snip]

> Although it is not mandatory, undergraduates in our position usually work on
> an academic project every summer, as I have for the past three years. So
> there is some chance that I may have to work on an academic project this
> summer, in which case I cannot participate in any capacity in your project.
> But if not, I shall have no commitments other than this project during the
> whole of the summer period. I can only be sure of which of these will happen
> by mid-April. GSoC wants mentoring organizations to finalize their list of
> students by April 20. In this scenario, would you advice me to apply for
> your project?

If there is a higher chance that you will not be able to meet your
commitment to the organization, I'd like you to think about whether
you'd want to make a proposal. I'm sorry that the decision has to be
this harsh, but as a mentoring organization administrator, nothing is
more painful than seeing an accepted slot being not utilized because a
student could not make it.

> As you will see in my CV and developer profile, I am confident with Python,
> MATLAB and Perl, and have some experience with C and C++. I have seen Python
> being mentioned in the Ankur projects. But in general there is no explicit
> criteria of programming knowledge mentioned in the ideas page. Could you
> kindly take a look at my programming experience and let me know whether you
> think it is okay for me to apply for one of your projects, given the skill
> set you would require? Of course, if I need to learn new tools to help with
> the project, that's absolutely no problem for me.

The premise of the project ideas page is that it is a collection of
problem statements. How to approach the solutions for the problems,
choosing a specific path among alternatives, proposing a set of tools,
languages etc are left as an exercise to the candidate.

-- 
sankarshan mukhopadhyay
<http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog/>