R GSOC FAQ

After a mentor has written a project idea, how much time should he/she expect to spend reviewing potential students?

If you write a good project test then you should be able to quickly figure out which student (if several apply for your project) is the best. Once you find the best student, you should probably spend a few hours reading and suggesting improvements to the application that he/she writes and will submit to Google.

What is the amount of time that mentors are expected to invest on students during the 3 months of coding?

You will need to allocate at least 1 hour a week for a skype call + the amount of time it takes to respond to students questions via email. For the student to be successful he will need you to be responsive to his/her questions. As a mentor it is your responsibility to only accept students that you will be able to adequately mentor. So a mentor who does not have much time must only accept a very autonomous students who does not need much more guidance than the weekly skype call, and a mentor with more time may be willing to accept a loss autonomous student.

How many students should a mentor expect to apply to each project idea?

It depends on the project idea. For my Animint project I had an application from Carson Sievert, who was clearly an ideal student, so I had to turn down a couple of other applicants. However some other projects never got any students who applied.

What skill levels can you expect from students?

You should clearly define what you expect from your students in the “test” part of your project idea. In my experience the best students will build on your project proposal and add their own ideas. For example Carson Sievert worked on my Animint package last summer, implementing facets and a bunch of other things that I suggested, and then he went on to implement shiny/Rmd integration which was not at all on my TODO list, and he did a great job pretty much without my guidance.

Can you decide to not run a project if you don’t find students with enough skills?

Yes if all the students that apply are clearly not good enough (or not autonomous enough), you should not accept them. However the R project regularly gets more slots than we can use from Google, so it may be worth it to take a chance on a student that you are unsure about.

Keep in mind that the main purpose of GSOC is to teach the students about open-source R package development, and that advancing your particular project is of secondary concern.

Also keep in mind that a student must apply to a mentor (to demonstrate that he/she is a good match for the project) and then to Google with a specific project proposal.

Would it be beneficial for students to apply to more than one project?

No. Students should pick one project and spend time creating a really good application for that project.

Is there a mentor-only forum that would be useful for me to join?

There is no mentor-only forum but you can get in touch with other mentors (as well as students) via the gsoc-r google group.