[Outreachy announcement] Internship spots clarification

[Outreachy Organizers]

[Cc'ing the announcements list to clarify for everyone]

Hi Shikha,

I can see your confusion about the number of internship spots displayed
on https://outreachy.org/apply/project-selection/

The short version is the number of internship spots is not a strong
indicator of whether you're going to be accepted as an intern if you
apply to a community.

We often have many applicants apply for communities that have funding
for multiple interns. That makes intern selection quite competitive.

Communities that only have one internship spot funded often don't get
many applicants, and sometimes don't end up accepting an intern at all.
It would be to someone's advantage to apply to communities with a low
number of internship spots, because they would stand out.

In the coming weeks, the project selection page will be updated to
reflect which projects have too many and too few applicants. That will
be a better indicator of your chances of being accepted as an intern.

Details
-------

The number of internship spots listed on
https://outreachy.org/apply/project-selection is the number of spots
that organization has funding to accept. For example, Mozilla has
committed to fund 15 interns and the Tor Project has committed to fund 1
intern.

Some communities haven't added all their projects yet. For example,
Mozilla has funding to accept up to 15 interns, but they only have four
projects added. Sometimes projects accept up to two interns to work on
the same project, but most projects only accept one intern.

Other communities list more projects than they have intern funding for.
For example, Fedora lists two projects, but they have funding to accept
one intern.

We encourage communities to list more projects than they have funding
for because we may be able to find additional funding for them. For
example, the Linux kernel currently has four projects listed, but only
has funding for one intern. We're in the process of reaching out to
additional sponsors to find additional funding for the Linux kernel.

Outreachy also has a general fund that communities can ask to use in
order to fund additional strong applicants. After the application
deadline, communities indicate which applicants they need Outreachy
general funding for. Outreachy organizers review the requests, and fund
the strongest applicants that we have funding for.

So really, when you see a project that lists "1 intern" it should read
"1 intern, maybe 2 interns, maybe no interns if there's not enough
interest".

I hope this explanation helps!

Sage Sharp
Outreachy Organizer

On Thu, Mar 01, 2018 at 03:31:54PM -0000, Shikha Goyal wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I am Shikha Goyal, senior year student at a university of India.
> 
> I am interested in applying for Outreachy Round 16, but I have some doubts, regarding open outreachy internship page, where the number of interns taken for each project is mentioned.
> As for some organizations, the number of interns is less than the number of projects. So is that the some of the projects of that organization will be ignored during selection.
> And for some projects, the number of interns are more than the projects. So is that they will take multiple interns for the same project?
> I qualified the eligibility criteria for this coming round.
> 
> Regards
> shikha
> Amrita University
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