GitHub Externships: enabling India’s next generation of developers

Students hold a special place in our ❤️! They are our next generation of developers who will continue to drive software innovation forward for our digital nation. That’s why we’re taking the GitHub Externships to the next level, and we are launching the winter cohort available to students in India.

The latest India Skills report 2021 highlights 85.92% of students are looking at internships to kickstart their careers. This is understandable, considering roles in today’s evolving digital economy require highly skilled talent, often with hands-on experience. With over one million new engineering graduates in India every year, it is imperative that we all work together to equip future developers with the skills and the experience they need to succeed in the real world.

Building the right skills for the future

At GitHub Satellite India 2021 we announced the GitHub Externships, to help college students in India get real-world experience engaging with enterprises across the country, as well as collaborate on open source projects with other developers on GitHub. This builds on GitHub’s Campus Program by providing students a unique opportunity to engage with companies in India, via fellowship programs, and building the right skills future developers need to succeed in an enterprise environment. Students are mentored on real-world projects and gain skills around cloud technologies, software development methodologies and, most importantly, software development collaboration. The program really connects the dots between open source, the next generation of software developers, and successful companies.

Students, you amaze us!

Our first cohort this summer received in excess of 1300 student applications from 175 higher education institutions that are participating in our GitHub Campus Program. 62 students were selected as GitHub Externs to work with projects and mentors from 18 organizations. Students gained an invaluable learning experience, working on diverse projects, such as:

• Creating a parser for processing OpenAPI requests faster
• Working on winkJS for NLP in node.js
• Devising a custom Blockchain consensus algorithm
• Integrating real-live video collaboration platform API development
• Image optimization and cropping algorithms

Mentors, organization representatives and open source maintainers have been truly amazed by the energy, enthusiasm and commitment shown by these students. Through the program, participants also received meaningful mentorship and hands-on experience, enhancing their job prospects. In fact, many organizations extended pre-placement offers to some of the students!

Sign up for the GitHub Externships Winter Cohort!

As we continue to support India’s talented student developers, we’re thrilled to announce the GitHub Externships Winter Cohort! This season we’re adding a new DevSecOps track, along with Open Source (of course!), to help college students gain deeper software development skills. With the support of partners including Deepsource, Appwrite, TigerGraph, Symbl.AI, Hoppscotch, FamPay, Zeeve, Abridged Inc, Leverice, Saraverse, and many more, providing projects and mentors, our GitHub Externship program will help nurture talent and enable the next generation of developers in India to drive the country’s digital future.

Applications are now open and students have until 11:59 pm IST on December 14, 2021 to apply.

If you have any questions, start a GitHub Discussion here. Learn about the latest GitHub updates in India by following @GitHubIndia on Twitter.

Written by

Maneesh Sharma

@msupernaut