GitHub has partnered with Adobe and American Express (AmEx) to deliver a significant expansion of its MLH Fellowship.
The world’s largest repo host first announced MLH Fellowship in May last year. As the world adapted to remote work, the fellowship aimed to give students the opportunities they need to succeed.
93 percent of fellows said that participation in the initiative gave them more confidence in making open-source contributions. On the other side of the equation, 76 percent of maintainers said their open-source project was in a better state after working with MLH fellows.
The fellowship matches up “pods” of 8-10 students with open-source projects and mentors over a period of 12 weeks. Initial partners included Facebook, DEV, and the Royal Bank of Canada.
Kathy Kam, Head of Open Source at Facebook, said:
“What started as a targeted initiative to address the global need for tech internships last summer has quickly become one of the most exciting and impactful partnerships that Facebook Open Source is currently investing in.
Open-source has always held the promise of building inclusive communities around technology. We think that the MLH Fellowship has the potential to make meaningful progress in fulfilling that promise by helping to empower developers from all around the world from diverse backgrounds.
Facebook has been a strong supporter of this mission through our partnership with MLH on the Year-Long Fellowship Program and the Black Diversity Scholarship and we’re thrilled to see the fellowship continue to grow.”
From its initial launch, GitHub called on further tech companies to join the initiative.
Just a few months away from the anniversary of the fellowship’s launch, GitHub has announced that Adobe and AmEx will be contributing as part of the Summer 2021 cohort.
Marc Gordon, Chief Information Officer at American Express, commented:
“Open-source helps American Express provide the world’s best customer experience every day by allowing our developers to innovate, collaborate and share. We are committed to investing in the professional development of our engineers, and we are proud to back the broader engineering community by supporting the MLH Fellowship.
Open-source software ignites innovation that makes a positive difference in people’s lives. Through the MLH Fellowship, we are committed to ensuring that software engineering students from a variety of diverse backgrounds are able to reach their full potential.”
Students can participate in three different programs as part of MLH Fellowship 2021:
- Explore – Helps students to build out their portfolio and experiment with new tech through a series of short hackathon sprints.
- Open Source – Rather than interning at a single company, open-source fellows can contribute to a variety of critical open-source projects on GitHub. This helps students to find something they’re interested in while teaching the ins and outs of the open-source community.
- Externship – Fellows complete a technical interview before being placed at a specific company, receiving mentorship and real-world experience.
Over 20 percent of students who were matched for jobs at an MLH Fellowship partner ended up receiving full-time offers at that company.
(Photo by Richy Great on Unsplash)
