Today we’re introducing the MLH Fellowship, a remote internship alternative for student technologists. We’ve seen first hand that talent is universally distributed, whether you go to a prestigious university or you’re a self-taught developer living far from the nearest startup office. However, opportunities are not yet universally distributed. Where you go to school has an immense impact on the job prospects made available to you.
Major League Hacking’s mission is to empower hackers. Throughout our history many of our efforts have been designed to address this specific issue, of helping students access opportunities regardless of where they might live or go to school. The MLH Fellowship directly addresses this inequality. We’re partnering up with GitHub to launch our inaugural 12-week program for Summer 2020. We’ll be funding up to 1,000 students to work full time on major open source projects under the mentorship of experienced engineers.
Fellows will have the opportunity to build their professional network, learn real-world engineering skills, and add a recognizable and high impact open source project to their resume while having a ton of fun with their teammates. We will be able to pay each Fellow a stipend for their contributions via the GitHub Sponsors payment platform which supports more than 32 global regions, kickstarting our efforts to democratize opportunities regardless of where you live.
What you work on during your internship is critical, not only to the perception employers have of you, but also on your own ability to learn the skills you need for industry. We’re proud to announce that Fellows will have the opportunity to contribute directly to major open source projects used by millions of developers around the world like React, Homebrew, Jest, and DEV. The MLH Fellows program is designed from the ground up to give maintainers additional leverage by having paid engineering mentors from Raise.dev work with the students on their day-to-day learnings and contributions to the projects. Applications are open for additional maintainers to join our program and help train the next generation of good open source citizens.
Thousands of students in the MLH community have lost their internships or even full time jobs as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. Thanks to our partners at GitHub, Facebook, the Royal Bank of Canada, and DEV, we are already able to provide more than 100 of them with the opportunity to work on something meaningful this summer. If you know anyone who would like to help us change the lives of even more students and help us hit our goal of 1,000 Fellows, please put them in touch.
We are proud to create opportunities for students during a time when their lives have been upended, but we also strongly believe that the MLH Fellowship program and others like it are part of an inevitable trend of the democratization of work.
We can’t wait to see what you learn, build, and share this summer.
Happy Hacking,
Swift & the MLH Team