Open Source Office Wraps Up Inaugural Internship Program

The Georgia Tech Open Source Program Office (OSPO) recently concluded its first Virtual Summer Internship Program (VISP). The program invited students to learn fundamental skills needed for open-source development.

Twenty-eight students from a broad range of disciplines participated in the internship program. Throughout the 10-week program, students learned new open-source software and software engineering skills, including how to use tools like Git. They also learn about interacting with open-source code bases, implementing code testing, and growing an open-source project.

The students used these skills to contribute to open-source software projects, which were part of weekly lessons from OSPO staff. Students were also paired with Georgia Tech and industry mentors, including several from IBM, to work on existing open-source projects.

“Through this process, the students learned how to review GitHub issues, make fixes and contributions, and go through the code review process,” said Jeffrey Young, OSPO director and principal research scientist with PACE.

“These open source skills are so important for all our students to learn as they are critical for both jobs and software internships and increasingly for students engaging with AI-related software.”

Students had the opportunity to work on a variety of projects, including the widely used PyTorch, Georgia Tech's MFC, IBM's Analog AI Hardware Kit, and popular frameworks for data center deployments, including Kubestellar, OpenHorizon, and OpenTelemety.

Ignacio Bartol, a Ph.D. student studying nuclear and radiological engineering, found the internship experience enlightening and useful as someone with a limited computer science background.

“I got to contribute to a very large project, PyTorch, which I use quite a bit for my research. I initially thought it was impossible to contribute to such a large project.

“But with the help of my mentors and the VSIP OSPO program, that became a possibility. I am super grateful for that chance,” Bartol said.

As a computational science and engineering master's student, Aishwarya Mathew was already familiar with open-source projects, but participating in VISP gave her valuable experience working on larger projects.

“It felt advantageous to gain more real-world experience with git as many of the full-time opportunities I was aiming for post-graduation would benefit from that,” Mathew said. “I highly recommend the program to those looking to build confidence and gain hands-on experience in the open source community through meaningful, real-world projects.”

The program concluded with a virtual poster presentation session, showcasing the projects they worked on and what they learned from the experience.

Young said they hope to evolve the program’s format next year to include additional internal Georgia Tech projects and eventually run a version of the internship during the fall and spring semesters as a course or club project.