Congrats! Its an absolutely awesome experience. Take advantage of the mentorship you get, because unless you go into academia you may not have a lot of opportunities to have an experienced engineer field your questions and review your work in a setting where there isn't "real job" deadline pressure.
Also: This makes me feel so old, as an '05 participant.
Congratulations to everybody! I wanted to participate but I learned about GSoC last week when reading through some Julia documentation. I would have been happy to work on their linear algebra related projects. Maybe next year!
I remember signing up to GSoC to work on a Java forum for an open-source wiki tool and not getting in. It sucked, but it pushed me to apply for another scheme and eventually I landed an internship in a local business using ASP.NET and I fell in love with C#. 5-6 years later, I still write C# and I'm very happy.
At the time I'd have chosen GSoC over the other internship scheme, but ultimately I think it all worked out very nicely for me. When one door closes, another usually opens.
Some mentors are looking after more than one project. Let's hope they can give the required attention to each project. Let's also hope the corporate managers who sponsored the projects in the first place allow those mentors to take sufficient time away from their charge out time to adequately mentor the students involved and be more able to ensure the project is a success. Allowing mentors adequate time out to assist the students is more important than squeezing every euro of bonus money out of them.
