Applying to MLH Fellowship - Tips & Tricks

I was at the college and got the news that I have been accepted into MLH Fellowship Prep Track (Oct Batch). I was really happy to see that !

What is MLH Fellowship?
MLH Fellowship is a fully remote, 12-week internship where participants earn a stipend and learn to collaborate on real open source projects with peers and engineers from top companies.

What is MLH Prep Fellowship ?
The MLH Fellowship Prep Program is a 3-week preparation program for aspiring technologists who are interested in experiencing the fellowship before committing to the full 12-weeks. You'll build out your portfolio of personal projects & experiment with new technologies by collaborating in small groups through a short hackathon sprint.

Application process for the Prep fellowship
You are asked to submit 3 essays and a code sample that showcases your skills. Let's talk about the essays first. Make sure you folks show that you are passionate about the fellowship as well as technology. Your first essay is all about how MLH Fellowship will help you grow and why you want to be a fellow. Your second essay is about what efforts can you do for the community or what all you can bring in for the community. The third essay is all about yourself. Try to add in your experience and all the community work you have done. The essays should be descriptive and the team should get to know about you and your skills. Now let's talk about the code sample. There are some requirements for your code sample that needs to be followed.
Code Sample Requirements:

• Representative: The sample should be representative of your abilities. If you’re submitting a group project, make sure you contributed a substantial amount of code. Projects that are based mostly on a tutorial aren’t representative of your own abilities.
• Existing sample: This is code that you wrote for a purpose other than this application. Public on GitHub: Your sample should be viewable on GitHub publicly. If you can’t make the repository public, convert your code to a secret GitHub Gist instead.
• Multiple files: Your sample should consist of multiple files and be of substance. It’s hard to have a conversation about a single function.
• Not too large: It’s difficult to have a conversation about a mono-repo with dozens of microservices. It should be immediately clear what you contributed to the sample. Dense frameworks with lots of boilerplate such as Django or Laravel don’t usually make for good code samples. Lightweight frameworks such as Flask and Express are good examples.
• The real problem: Your sample should solve a real problem or accomplish a real goal. While some class projects will meet this criterion, most won’t. There’s nothing wrong with the binary search tree you wrote, but it’ll be hard for your interviewers to get to know you through that kind of sample.
• No Jupyter notebooks: We need to see your ability to write a project that an end-user can use. It should be deployable. We don’t accept Jupyter notebooks or other exploratory code samples because it’s difficult to have a conversation about your coding skills with these.

Tips for the code sample

• Make sure your code sample shows your latest skills.
• Your code sample should be well documented (README).
• Make sure you comment your code.
• Use good variable and function names. Make sure that describes what are you trying to achieve through that function or variable.

As soon as you clear the reviewing phase,you will be invited for a short interview.
I hope all these tips helped you, if it did consider buying me a coffee here

You can connect with me here
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddhi-bhanushali
Twitter : https://twitter.com/SiddhiB6?t=AQXtt7SKKpkhXkOLYLeNJA&s=09