Milky way as seen from the earth — **“Curiosity is the essence of our existence”** ~ Gene Cernan

Childhood, as stated by UNICEF is “a time for children to be in school and at play, to grow strong and confident with the love and encouragement of their family and an extended community of caring adults.”
Thinking about it today, it seems like being connected to a continuous 240 V supply of dreams, curiosity, excitement and innocence.

Encyclopedia — Kingfisher’s Book of the Universe — My favourite encyclopedia. In mint condition after 15 years (Thank you mom for not letting me rip off the outer paper cover 😜)

One of my dreams was to be an astronomer. I remember having a lot of encyclopedias on space as a kid(Geek Alert — I have read all my encyclopedias at least 10 times😅 ). I went to NASA once and even built a model telescope (which showed an inverted 20x zoomed image).
Whenever did an adult ask “beta what do you want to be when you grow up?” I always replied, “I want to be an Astronomer!!”

But the hurdle for realizing my childhood dreams was none other than the Indian Education System(a story for some other time).

Back to the present, I am a sophomore pursuing my undergrad in Computer Science with a minor in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning(my second favourite area of interest) at Mumbai.
Recently, I stumbled across a term called Computational Astrophysics, which according to Nature.com is “the study of the phenomena that occur in space using computer simulations. This can involve modelling processes that take place over millions of years, such as colliding galaxies or the slow destruction of a star by a black hole.” There exists a harmonious amalgamation of Astrophysics and Computer Science(uses ML as well, woohoo!!). I was overjoyed, I felt like I had finally found my calling, life had come around in a full circle.

“When you have a childhood dream that still burns and tugs at your heart when you’re an adult, you owe it to yourself to pursue and achieve this dream.” — Robert Cheeke

Google Summer of Code 2020 — My journey

2020 brought with it bushfires, riots, plane crashes and the most dreaded COVID-19 Coronavirus. But COVID-19 turned out to be a blessing in disguise for me!! (more on this later).

I planned to apply for Google Summer of Code(GSoC; I’m particularly fond of the abbreviation) during my semester break in December. I read about the program, it’s benefits to the Open-Source community, the value it would add to my profile, the unique learning experience it provides, as well as the nitty-gritty of the application process. I won’t lie, it seemed to be pretty intimidating at first, but luckily my seniors who were a part of GSoC’2019 had briefed us about the program(thanks a ton Pujan, Ruturaj, Sahil😁) well in advance.

First things first, I dual booted Ubuntu on my laptop(best decision ever!!), got familiarized with the basics of GitHub and set up IRC and Slack on my laptop(I was already using Slack for another college club).
Now, with the prerequisites out of the picture, I went through the organizations that had consistently been a part of GSoC for the last 5 years.
My skillset mainly includes Python, Data Science and Machine Learning with some experience in Web Development. I searched for organizations which had projects in Python with some exciting applications. I shortlisted CERN-HSF, OpenAstronomy and INCF. During my break, I contributed to a few repositories by fixing a few bugs, spelling-errors, refactoring code and the like.

February 18th, 2020, the date when the student projects were going to be announced came faster than I had anticipated. I followed the same approach as I did in December while shortlisting organizations and topics. In addition to the organizations I had shortlisted in December, I looked for new organizations and topics that interested me. Initially, I had a long list of 8 topics(too many!) which then narrowed down to 5 and then finally 2.
One from CERN-HSF and another from OpenAstronomy for a framework called Stingray. I did not qualify the evaluations for the topic at CERN-HSF(tough luck).

Time passed in a blink, and lo and behold it was the 5th of March, 2020. I had barely made any real progress on the Stingray topic. I was constantly juggling my college work, tests and the GSoC project to no avail. Remember, I had mentioned above that COVID-19 turned out to be a boon in disguise for me? here’s why.
My college was shut by the 12th of March, 2020 due to the fear of COVID-19. The last day of the proposal submission was on the 31st of March, 2020. This meant I had 19 whole days(with continuous college work and lectures 🤦‍♂️) to work on the project and submit my proposal for the topic “A lightning-fast stingray: Parallelizing stingray operations to analyze larger-than-memory datasets”.

The task seemed to be daunting but finally after a lot of coffee, monster energy drinks, sleepless nights and an amazing amount of help and support from my mentor Mr Matteo Bachetti(I was stupefied and scared to approach Mr Bachetti initially after reading his credentials, but Matteo you’re an amazing person!! I look up to you) I finally submitted my proposal on the 28th of March, 2020(phew!). Now came the hardest phase, waiting for the results.

Chances to get into GSoC’2020. The odds were stacked against me. — The acceptance rate for GSoC in 2020 was 2.398%

37 days, 11 hours, 30 minutes later(approx.) at 11:30 pm on the 4th of May, 2020… the Google Summer of Code website crashed🙄.
It was11:33 pm(believe me, every second passes like an eternity) and I hadn’t received an email and the website was still not active. After 60 eternities the website finally loaded. I carefully typed in my email id and password and as I clicked enter(cue the palpitations, dry mouth, fidgety fingers and the tick-tock of an old clock) Hallelujah!! a dashboard with my topic and my name opened. I was overjoyed, ecstatic, elated, thrilled, jubilant, on the seventh heaven; in short, all the synonyms of the word ‘happiness’ couldn’t describe the emotions racing through me at that moment. I had just got into Google Summer of Code 2020!! I was one of 1199 students from the 50,000+ who had registered for the program!!!

This was my first blog for my GSoC series. I will be posting weekly blogs. Please comment and leave a clap if you liked the article. Feel free to reach out to me on Linkedin. Thank you soo much for giving it a read, have an amazing day!! You are awesome!!!