CLIMB Mentorship Program- Consolidated Report
Week 1–4: To discuss various internships, scholarships and open-source opportunities and creating a presence
This week was all about opportunities and how to approach and tackle them effectively.
We discussed a wide range of applications that we can fill right now or in the near future. Some of them included Google Generation Scholarship (formerly known as Google WTM Scholarship), Grace Hopper Conference Scholarship, GHCI’21, Adobe WIT Scholarship, Coddess by Microsoft, AmazeWow by Amazon, etc.
Apart from the above-mentioned scholarship opportunities, we also discussed various open-source opportunities like Outreachy, GSoC, GSSoC, and how to look out for some other open-source programs using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
The key takeaway from the above discussion was the importance of being aware of such opportunities and how to start preparing a sample draft for the essays and keep enhancing it before submitting the final one after getting it reviewed. As far as open-source programs are concerned, one should always keep in mind the importance of the contributing period, the time investment each contributing project requires, and how important it is to create a mark on the organization and/or mentors you are contributing for.
All the applications should have a personal touch to them.
The answers should not be vague and generic.
Since I am more inclined towards finding my career at the crossroads of finance and technology, we even discussed how to crack internships at leading investment firms and how to prepare for the same with an optimized approach. During the call, our mentor even began a process of allotting one DSA topic every week from LeetCode and provided us with interview-specific questions to be solved from that particular topic and was there always if we faced any hurdles.
The tasks given to us for the course of the weeks were the following:
- Filling out applications for the above-mentioned programs.
- Looking into the application for the Open Source programs and scholarship opportunities exclusively for women in STEM fields.
- Getting our profiles checked and collecting feedback from our mentor.
- Attempting questions from the DSA Track as mentioned every week and look for optimized ways to solve it using different algorithms.
- Finally, creating a project for showcasing it in our resume based on algorithms, web development, or basic machine learning.
We even talked about the difference between Research Internships and Industry central internships and how one should be clear from the beginning of what area they want to specialize in. We also discussed improving our LinkedIn profiles, getting started with Git and Github, maintaining a repository, etc. And lastly, we concluded on how to go about building our CV and getting shortlisted for internships based on them.
THIS WAS BEYOND WORDS 💖
All of us mentees in our small batch learnt a lot from our mentor Anshita. She went out of her way and shared all the wisdom she had collected over the years and even shared her little secret tips with us!
I am grateful to Climb DTU and Anshita ma’am for their time and efforts to pull out such a helpful program for us fellow women! :)
