GitHub Campus Experts Take on the MLH Fellowship

Contributing to open source often takes more than coding ability — it takes community knowledge, communication skills, and the confidence to put yourself out there. Three GitHub Campus Experts are about to put those skills to the test as part of the fall 2022 MLH Fellowship cohort: Samson Amaugo (@sammychinedu2ky), Tushar Gupta (@tushar5526), and Nathaly Toledo (@ahn-nath).

The MLH Fellowship is a twelve-week program that pairs students with open source maintainers and mentors. Participants learn how popular projects operate behind the scenes and what maintainers deal with on a regular basis. By the end, fellows have contributed to major projects on GitHub used by developers worldwide. This particular cohort stands out as the first composed entirely of Campus Experts.

GitHub Campus Experts are student leaders who build inclusive spaces for learning and collaboration. They organize meetups, conferences, and hackathons around the globe while maintaining open source projects themselves. We spoke with the three fellows about what brought them to the program and what they hope to gain from it.

Samson Amaugo

GitHub Handle: @sammychinedu2ky

How did the Campus Experts program prepare you?

Being a Campus Expert comes with tech advocacy responsibilities that translate directly into skills needed for the Fellowship. Those include communicating and collaborating with peers, as well as picking up new technologies quickly. Samson looks forward to further improving those areas during the Fellowship.

What do you hope to learn?

The chance to work with people from different cultures and mixed-tech backgrounds makes for an environment where learning happens not just from project managers but from pod mates too. Samson aims to develop soft skills and improve his project management and contribution dynamics.

Tushar Gupta

GitHub Handle: @tushar5526

How did the Campus Experts program prepare you?

Campus Experts gave Tushar unique insight into community culture. That experience shaped an essay that helped his Fellowship applications clear initial screening. Both programs share core values — working for the growth of the community — which made the transition natural. His Campus Experts experience modeled his thought process to resonate with the Fellowship's values, so interviews and the rest of the process felt like an easy fit.

What do you hope to learn?

He is excited to interact with talented Fellows from around the world and learn from their approaches to problem-solving. Getting hands-on experience with real-world projects while building skills like teamwork, effective communication, and working across different tech stacks is a big draw. He hopes the Fellowship will give him a clearer picture of how software is ideated, developed, and managed for real-world use cases.

Nathaly Toledo

GitHub Handle: @ahn-nath

How did the Campus Experts program prepare you?

Before becoming a Campus Expert, Nathaly was rejected four times from the Fellowship. She attributes part of that to focusing entirely on technical skills. The Campus Experts program shifted her focus to other aspects of her career and community roles. It helped her build soft skills that make her profile more robust and communicate her value with more confidence. It also gave deeper meaning to her leadership in tech, which she says should go beyond being good at coding.

What do you hope to learn?

She is looking forward to discussing and learning from top talent about troubleshooting and finding solutions to technical challenges while collaborating with other Fellows. Working with professional mentors is also part of the draw — she wants help recognizing her weaknesses and understanding the level she needs to reach to build top-level software. She expects the program will exceed her expectations.

We will be watching these three Campus Experts as they move through the Fellowship and make their mark on open source projects.