MLH Fellowship, powered by GitHub, welcomes American Express and Adobe to the Summer 2021 Program

Students crave hands-on experience, and companies look for developers who can contribute to existing projects. As the home to the world’s largest community of developers, we have the great responsibility to empower young developers and enable opportunities like the MLH Fellowship, powered by GitHub.

We’re not alone in our commitment to change the ecosystem. Adobe and American Express have partnered with the Fellowship to level-up student developers, around the globe. They join the clarion call for industry change with Facebook, Dev.to and AWS.

Through the Fellowship, students will have an opportunity to sustain their growth, using real tools and experience around how to collaborate remotely and globally, all while working alongside experienced engineers. The Spring 2021 session is underway, but registration for the Summer 2021 class is now open. Sign up here.

Growing an ecosystem of global developers

Initially launched in Summer 2020, the Fellowship was created to address the critical need for internships that were disrupted due to the pandemic. While traditional internships have not resumed, remote programs like the MLH Fellowship are paving the way for the future of education. Over the past six months, the Fellowship has already graduated hundreds of student developers, providing students with unique opportunities to:

• Experience day-to-day interaction with real-world developer tools and communication practices: 93% of fellows said that participating in the MLH Fellowship made them more confident contributing to open source, and 72% said it was better than any other internships they’ve had.
• Make impactful contributions to today’s software supply chain: 76% of maintainers said their open source project was in a better state after working with MLH fellows.
• Kickstart their careers in software development: Of the eligible fellows who expressed interest in jobs with one MLH Fellowship partner company, more than 20% ended up receiving offers at that company.

Our partners

“Open source helps American Express provide the world’s best customer experience every day by allowing our developers to innovate, collaborate, and share. We are committed to investing in the professional development of our engineers, and we are proud to back the broader engineering community by supporting the MLH Fellowship. Open source software ignites innovation that makes a positive difference in people’s lives. Through the MLH Fellowship, we are committed to ensuring that software engineering students from a variety of diverse backgrounds are able to reach their full potential.” – Marc Gordon, Chief Information Officer, American Express

“Open source plays a critical role in how we enable developers to build on the Creative Cloud Developer Platform, whether they are creating plugins for desktop apps like Photoshop, or integrating with services like Creative Cloud Libraries. We’re excited to collaborate with the MLH Fellowship to engage with developers early in their careers through open source. We can’t wait to help the fellows get some commits in and bring new ideas to life.” – Ash Ryan Arnwine, Sr. Manager of Developer Experience & Evangelism for Creative Cloud, Adobe

“What started as a targeted initiative to address the global need for tech internships last summer has quickly become one of the most exciting and impactful partnerships that Facebook Open Source is currently investing in. Open source has always held the promise of building inclusive communities around technology. We think that the MLH Fellowship has the potential to make meaningful progress in fulfilling that promise by helping to empower developers from all around the world from diverse backgrounds. Facebook has been a strong supporter of this mission through our partnership with MLH on the Year-Long Fellowship Program and the Black Diversity Scholarship and we’re thrilled to see the fellowship continue to grow.” – Kathy Kam, Head of Open Source, Facebook

For companies looking to learn more about MLH Fellowship, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch here.

Written by

Vanessa Gennarelli

@mozzadrella