How do I identify projects?

Primary goal here is to provide learning avenues for students. So any idea which you think would give ample opportunity for a college student to learn would qualify as a project. Here are few of the ideas to identify a project

■ Building developer friendly tools and utilities.

■ Projects related to your work which you think will be apt for a beginner. You can abstract out a part of your work which can be worked on independently.

■ Projects you did as a part of college course work. You can get student to reimplement it.


■ Implementing a Research paper. It can also be a research paper you or someone else has already implemented.

■ Guiding a student in implementing the challenges previously hosted on platforms like Kaggle, DrivenData, Topcoder, HackerEarth, etc

■ Some fun idea that you have always wanted to work on but could not find time for. Student can work along with you on such ideas.

■ Low-hanging fruits kind of projects. Projects which you think are too trivial and require minimal familiarity with the codebase and basic technical knowledge. They are relatively short, with clear goals but still can provide great learning for beginners.

■ Infrastructure and automation kind of projects. These projects are the code that your organisation uses to get its development work done; for example, projects that improve the automation of releases, regression tests and automated builds. This is a category in which a student can be really helpful, doing work that the development team has been putting off while they focus on core development.

How do I define a project?

Broadly one can use these points to identify the projects -

■ Identify the possible topics based on your work, some open source project you work on, your past experience or some good to have functionality which you think will provide a good learning opportunity for students. Please check the what are the types of projects section below this for more details.

■ Try to categorise the topics into easy (no prior experience required), medium (some prior experience on related topics or prior unrelated development experience), hard (requires domain specific knowledge) and then see if it fits in the 1.5 to 2.5 months timeframe.

■ Identify the specifics from the topic which student would work on. It can be a set of small tasks, a new feature, a re-architecture, something to be built from scratch, or some exploration work. Have a look at the Types of projects below for more details.

■ Please submit project proposals for phase-1 by 10th May

Things to avoid

■ Projects which require you to share your organisations repositories, code or business logic with the students

■ Projects which have a hard dependencies on external resources such as cloud compute/storage, paid licenses, etc. For projects which require CPU/GPU resources, AWS Educate and Google for Education can be used

Do I have to pay accepted students or give them any merchandise on successful completion?

Neither you, your organisation or InternLink is obliged to remunerate students

Do I have to give systems to accepted students to work on?

No. Students are supposed to use their own systems to work on the projects.

How do I communicate with the students?

■ You can use any medium of communication of your choice to connect with the student. Few of the options - Email, Call/Mobile Chat, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Amazon Chime, IRC, Zoom, BlueJeans, Hangout, etc

Some tips for to establish better communication -

■ Try to fix time of the day for communication with students

■ Build guidelines for students before contacting you. Example - Look at the logs, Add debugging lines, Look up online. Repeat these steps at least a couple of times

Good practices while submitting proposal -

■ Link to the resources, videos which will be useful in understanding the project.

■ Be clear about the project ideas. Be sure to write a few sentences describing what you need accomplished and not just an overall theoretical version of what you might want.

■ Try to give an overview of how the projects the student will be working on generally gets used in the industry.

■ Try to give a big picture of the project domain, how it is linked to organization as a whole

■ Publish some FAQs related to project

What details should the project include?

Please refer to mentor project submission guide.

What should be the duration of the project?

Ideally, the project should take somewhere in the range of 1.5 months to 3 months to complete.

Submit following details in the project submission form -

■ A project title

■ Detailed description of the project. What does it do, what are the expected outcomes, relevance of the project, etc

■ Programming language/s to be used

■ Min Skills requirement - e.g.
▸ Student should he well versed in Project Programming language Python, Java, etc
▸ Familiarity with some framework - Git. ,etc

■ Specific points that you would like the students to mention in the application

■ What is the duration project? (Assuming a student with a little prior experience will be working on this)

■ How many student applications will you accept?

■ Categories project as beginner, moderate or expert

■ Link to Resources related to project

Submit your application in pdf format. Your application should contain,

■ Project title

■ Describe why you should be selected for this project (maximum 5 lines)

■ Your resume

■ You can also add links to your GitHub profile, project pages etc

■ Answer any question asked by the mentors for the project you are applying