Hello! Welcome to my Outreachy blog (and also my stream of consciousness blog). My name is Melissa, and I’m an Outreachy intern working on the Cephadm project at Ceph. As part of my 3 month internship, I’ll be blogging to share my experiences with Outreachy and Ceph. I’ll begin with an introduction on who I am and then talk more about Outreachy and what motivated me to apply. In another post I will go into more detail about the project I’m currently working on. I hope this can help anyone who is interested in applying to Outreachy, or interested in tech and may be from a similar background! :)

About Me

I’m a Canadian university student who is currently transitioning into computer science and tech. What I mean by that is that I’ve just graduated with a degree in Health Sciences, and am returning to school in the fall of 2021 to pursue a 2 year degree in Computer Science. I realized while doing my first undergrad that a career in the healthcare field was not something I was interested in pursuing further. My interest in the field drew from my aptitude for the natural sciences which I felt I had fully explored. However, one thing that I hadn’t quite explored yet was my interest in computers and technology, something that fascinated me as a child but which I never quite felt encouraged to pursue.

Last summer, I took some time to really self-reflect. What did I want to do as a career? Why did I want to do it? This was honestly a really hard time for me because it felt like by asking myself these questions I was confronting the idea of who I am, which somehow along the way I had conflated with my future career. (Now I’m doing my best to disentangle these separate ideas)

That same summer, I began programming in python as a hobby, and I discovered I really enjoyed it. I made little programs for fun, did side projects, entered into hackathons, and took my first steps into the world of open source. And from those positive experiences I made the decision to go back to school for Computer Science and to pursue a career in tech! This led me to apply and later be accepted for Outreachy.

Enter Outreachy

It really seemed like Outreachy was designed for me. And not me specifically, but for people like me. I say this because I think this just shows the amazing effort by Outreachy since one of its core missions is to help people from underrepresented backgrounds break into tech. From my previous experiences with contributing to open source, I became really interested in open source software, which is another mission of Outreachy’s: to promote open source. I loved how the organizations which participate with Outreachy are open source. I also really admired Outreachy’s mission to support diversity in tech, which is something I also feel passionately towards. And of course it’s really beneficial to work on production grade code, to be exposed to practices and industry standards, to have your code reviewed by others, to have mentorship, etc. For these reasons and more, I applied to Outreachy.

For anyone who is considering, I highly recommend applying as well! It can be intimidating to make your first contributions to open source (I remember how nervous I was making my very first PR), but the community that I’ve met so far has been wonderful and welcoming. And to go out of your comfort zone for a small time and then a little more each time, it really is rewarding and you’ll learn so much.