On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 4:47 AM Amit Kumar <dtu.a...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> My biggest concern with the new rules is the reduced stipend, which >> could have consequences of raising the barrier of who can apply. > > > Why do you think so? Reduced stipend comes with reduced work isn't it?
Perhaps. I hope that Google makes it clear that the program is actually only ~1 month of full time work, which can be spread out as part time work over several months if desired. And even if it is strictly speaking less money for a smaller amount of time, students who might want to use GSoC to get some income over the summer may now need to find an additional source on top of GSoC. It may be easier for them to just find a single internship somewhere else that pays more. What I meant by a barrier to who can apply is that people have access to higher paying summer internships will be less likely to apply to GSoC. This is already a problem, in my opinion, as we have seen much fewer applicants from countries like the US, especially relative to what would be expected given the size of the population of US college students in CS or math programs. These people are only likely to apply to GSoC if they prefer it for more idealistic reasons, such as that it offers the ability to contribute to open source. This can also be viewed as a positive argument, and Google generally spins it this way. Whether it is a net positive or not, I'm not sure. I can only say it definitely does reduce the number of applicants of this type. On the flip side, a lower amount prevents people who can only afford to get a job that pays up to a certain amount, because they need the money. This tends to affect people from lower income countries more. This effect would be most strongly seen from the change they made a few years ago to adjust the stipend to be different for each country based on purchasing power parity. Actually, I was surprised that after this change, the number of applicants from India did not appear to go down, even though the stipend was significantly reduced there. I'm not really sure what to make of that, other than perhaps the effect I mentioned above that biases against more privileged students is stronger than the effect against less privileged ones. I don't have any data to back any of this up, though, only what I have noticed personally from the changes in applicants to SymPy over the past several years. I should also note that these do not necessarily only affect things across country lines, as even within a single country such as the US, students have a wide range of income levels and other circumstances that can affect how they view GSoC as something they would want to apply for. As an aside, it's unfortunate that this was forwarded to the list instead of copy-pasted. The responses to this list are now lost in the responses to the original mentor list in my email. Aaron Meurer > > - > Amit > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "sympy" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to sympy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/91d75951-b918-4029-b5a9-62f98c69eaeen%40googlegroups.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sympy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/CAKgW%3D6Jv%3DEwkJGaB3ngUmrpmO8ALT1K2LhBR0_nHdDix05eFKw%40mail.gmail.com.
