GitHub Externship Track Opens for MLH Fellowship Applications

Applications are now open for the MLH Fellowship: GitHub Externship Track, a program that gives students hands-on experience supporting the codebases that run GitHub. The track builds on an existing seven-year collaboration between Major League Hacking and GitHub, adding a structured opportunity for early-career developers to contribute to both open source and innersource parts of GitHub while earning a stipend.

Participants will work on projects that directly affect the experience of millions of developers who use the platform daily. The program combines real-world engineering work with structured training and mentorship from the GitHub community, covering areas that include both public-facing code and internal systems.

Mentorship and Ownership

The program emphasizes treating student engineers as full team members from the start. In a testimonial included in the announcement, GitHub software engineer Stephanie Giang describes her own internship experience: she felt supported by a welcoming team, was encouraged to pair with colleagues, and took the lead on shaping her projects and daily workflow. By the end of her internship, she shipped a feature she was passionate about, built from start to finish with guidance from her manager and team.

“MLH has been working with GitHub for seven years to teach early career developers around the world how to collaborate on their code in a meaningful way using industry-leading tools. With the addition of the MLH Fellowship: GitHub Externship Track, we’ll get to empower the next generation of developers in building those same industry-leading tools with the opportunity to work on GitHub’s core codebases. It’s the experience I wish I had when I was starting out.” — Mike Swift, CEO & Co-Founder at MLH

Application Details

Applications will be accepted until September 13 at 11:59pm ET. While the program welcomes applicants from all backgrounds, the organizers are especially interested in candidates with experience in specific languages and frameworks: Ruby/Rails, C++, C#, Go, JavaScript, and functional programming languages such as Haskell or OCaml.

Questions about the program can be directed to [email protected]. For updates on GitHub Education, follow the GitHub Blog, GitHub Campus TV, and the @GitHubEducation Twitter account.