My journey in MLH fellowship till now has been a life changing experience. Meeting new people, working on new projects and collaborating over code was something extremely new for me which MLH made possible and with this blog, I would describe my journey of becoming an MLH fellow. My acceptance into MLH was a 6 month long affair (yes, I waited 6 months to be an MLH fellow) and the preparation starts even before that !
The beginning
It all started in Nov’20 when I got to know about open source and totally got interested in it at the first glance. Upon searching more ,I came to know about the MLH fellowship which sounded like a great program and something very new for me. MLH had 3 tracks, one of which was open source and I decided I am going to apply for the Spring batch (Feb - April).
The preparation
As any beginner, I was daunted by the code in open source but luckily the open source community is vivid and helpful and there are always people to help you get started. One such person who helped me was Harsh Bardhan Mishra. His tips about how to prepare for interviews were quite helpful for me. I applied and honestly answered the questions in the application and submitted my project.
Next step was to study everything about my project in depth. Every line of code I wrote in my project, I made sure I understood it completely and was well versed with the concepts of it. My project focused on Javascript and everyday I wanted to improve my code to make it better. I documented it, commented on it, revised my Javascript notes again and again and improved the code in order to present my project perfectly. MLH fellowship was a big opportunity for me and being in an MLH hackathon previously, I was too enthusiastic for it and decided I had to give in everything in preparation.
The process
First interview
After submitting the application, I was quite anxious and waited for an email for an interview. I luckily passed the application evaluation phase and was called for an interview after a week of submitting the application. The first interview was not so technical, it included questions like :
- Why do you want to be an MLH fellow?
- Describe your project.
- Any experience with open source ?
- What are your expectations from the fellowship and how it will help you?
- Confirmation for availability for fellowship, confirming whether I meet the requirements of the fellowship and listening to the application.
The conversation was pretty nice. My interviewer was Rashika Karki who was extremely friendly and I was dead nervous but she made the process easy for me.
After the interview, I was pretty happy and waited for the next interview call.
Second interview
I was called for a second interview within 5 days and had to fill in my availability for the interview. I was pretty nervous again and this time for this interview I was expected to explain my project and answer technical questions. I started preparing for it. My interviewer was Karan Sheth and when the interview started he asked for an introduction, introduced himself and asked me to explain my project. I explained the project and explained the important parts of the code , motivation behind my project, how I made it and what challenges I faced. At the end, he gave me some tips about Node.js (thanks to him for that) and appreciated the code. He was quite friendly and helped me present my code without any nervousness.
(PS - People from MLH are pretty friendly and nice and that makes the interview process a lot better).
The acceptance
I had a good feeling about the results and was expecting to get accepted. But, life isn’t always as we expect it to be. Turned out, I could not be matched with any pod (teams in MLH ) at that moment and was deferred to the summer batch. I just read the first part of the mail which said that I could not be matched with any pod and I became extremely upset and went for a walk. Upon returning, I real the whole mail which stated that I was deferred to summer batch (foolish me !). I was extremely happy that I would be an MLH fellow not immediately but in the near future (6 months to be exact).
In June, I got the email I was waiting for the last 6 months, “Congratulations. You are going to be an MLH fellow!”. My happiness knew no bounds. I was so excited to join my new pod and meet new people and contribute to open source.
The journey till now
On 7th July, I joined the MLH fellowship in Pod 3.0.1 and the fellowship is half over as I write this blog. Tasks accomplished till now :
- Contributing to my python project under MLH fellowship.
- Had one on ones with my pod and other fellows. (Did I mention that my podmates are the best ?! )
- Participated and won the MLH orientation hackathon alongwith 2 other podmates.
- Had amazing MLH talks delivered by amazing engineers.
- Attend standups which are fun and helpful.
- Had insightful conversations with amazing coders from the tech world.
And much more. The list goes on and on. One thing that increases exponentially is - learning. Each day I get to learn something new and each fellow I meet, teaches something new.
The conclusion and tips
MLH fellowship has been amazing till now for me and the experience till now is made possible by my pod leader, our project manager Will, my pod mates and the whole MLH staff (a big thanks to them!). My tips for anyone applying for the fellowship would be :
- Apply beforehand and not some days before the due date.
- Create a well written project and answers.
- Be confident !
- Be patient - MLH deals with an uncountable number of applications per cohort and it might be possible that the replies to your queries are delayed but they work hard so be patient !
- Know your code well - Since you wrote the project, it won’t be tough for you but go through each line of your code and know the concepts well.
- Try to stay calm - I know, the process can be stressful since we are all trying hard but maintaining calm will help you in the long run.
- Communicate well - Try to explain your project well and communicate nicely
All done for this blog !. if you have any queries, doubts related to MLH fellowship, feel free to reach me out on LinkedIn! All the best !