Hands-on coding experience for India’s graduates

India produces more than one million engineering graduates each year, and the country’s digital economy is increasingly looking for hires with practical, hands-on experience. According to the India Skills Report 2021, 85.92% of students see internships as the primary route to starting their careers.

To help bridge that gap, GitHub is opening applications for the winter cohort of GitHub Externships, available to students in India. The program, first announced at GitHub Satellite India 2021, is designed to give college students real-world exposure by working with enterprises across the country and collaborating on open source projects with other developers on GitHub.

From campus to enterprise

Building on the GitHub Campus Program, the externship gives students the chance to engage with companies through fellowship programs, where they are mentored on live projects. The focus is on developing the skills that matter in an enterprise setting: cloud technologies, software development methodologies, and collaborative development practices. The goal is to create a direct link between open source, emerging developers, and the companies that will eventually hire them.

First cohort results

The results from the initial summer cohort were strong. The program received over 1,300 applications from students at 175 institutions participating in the GitHub Campus Program. From that pool, 62 students were selected as GitHub Externs, working on projects mentored by representatives from 18 organizations.

The project work spanned a wide technical range, including:

  • Building a parser to speed up processing of OpenAPI requests
  • Contributing to winkJS for natural language processing in Node.js
  • Designing a custom blockchain consensus algorithm
  • Developing APIs for real-time video collaboration platforms
  • Implementing image optimization and cropping algorithms

Mentors and open source maintainers reported being impressed by the students’ engagement and commitment. Beyond the experience itself, the program appears to have had a tangible impact on participants’ job prospects, with several organizations extending pre-placement offers to externs.