GSOC2011StudentApplicationTemplate

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• NSoC Student application template
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Student Application Template

The following are specific items that the ns-3 team requests NSoC applicants to include in their proposal.

About You

Identity Information

• Name. Your name
• Email. Your contact email
• Country. Your country of citizenship
• Institution. Accredited institution where you are enrolled as student (college, university, master program, PhD program, undergraduate program, etc).
• Advisor. (if applicable). Is your research work supervised by a professor or research group?

Background

What experience or training do you have that makes you best suited to this project?
What is your previous experience with ns-3?

Education

Include your academic or professional background related to data networking, as well as any software experience with C++ and/or Python.
In which school program are you currently enrolled at and what is your specialty there?
When did you started your current studies?

Work

Be sure to denote any work experience you have in relevant areas.
Your past work experience does not need to be a job where you got paid, you can mention any projects you have participated in.
Have you ever worked on open source projects?

Research

Make sure to denote any research experience you have in relevant areas.

Personal Interests

Briefly tell us about the things you are interested in.

About The Project

Project Proposal

What is the specific topic or area of interest you are proposing to work on?
Explain what this project consists of.

Interest

Why are you particularly attracted to this project? What makes you the best candidate?

Future Plans

We are especially interested in NSoC applicants looking to pursue research or work in related areas in the future, so be sure to note any relevant plans you may have.

Approach

What is your technical plan for achieving the goals of the project?
What components and functionality will have to be developed, integrated etc.?
Which development methodology would you use? What testing approach are you going to use to ensure the code quality?

Deliverables

What do you plan as a mergeable code output for your NSoC effort? Please keep in mind that the program is only 10 weeks long and try to incorporate this realistically in your plan.
Try to isolate the project's main features, group them into coherent units, and list them as 'milestones' or 'deliverables'.
The order in which you list the deliverables should correspond to the chronological order in which they will be implemented.

Plan

What is your task schedule to implement your technical plan and develop your deliverables?
Try to break down the deliverables into small tasks and assign to each of them the time you think it is going to take you.
Make sure you consider the time you will need to test and fix your code after every deliverable is finished.
Order all the tasks chronologically and assign a start and an end date to each of them. Verify that the resulting schedule fits into the 10 weeks you will have.
It is important to leave some time at the end of the schedule for integrating, testing and fixing the complete project.

Timezone

What are your expected work hours (in UTC)?
What is your physical location for the summer?
The project places no requirements on these but it will affect chat scheduling as well as mentor availability and selection.

Commitments

Do you have any other commitments over the summer that would impair your ability to participate in the project, e.g., classes, thesis defense, existing work commitments, etc? Note: The project does not expect students to take personal vacations during this period; if there is a personal vacation planned, please state when, and how you would make up the time.

Of these, the Approach and Deliverables elements will require significant thought, development and discussion. Applicants are advised to bring their ideas to the ns-developers list and open up a discussion with the ns-3 team to develop these portions of their application prior to submission. Only applications that have well refined and developed technical objectives and plans are likely to be competitive. The ns-3 team will provide comments and help refine proposals somewhat after they are initially submitted, but obviously the stronger they start the stronger they will be. Also understand that the better you plan your project by discussing it on the list, the more clearer your path will seem through your summer. In the 2008, 2009 and 2010 GSoCs, our strongest student proposals were clearly those which had discussed their projects at length beforehand on the mailing list and on IRC.

In addition, once NSoC proposals have been accepted and reviewed, promising candidates will be invited to "meet" some of the ns-3 team and discuss their project further in an IRC chat.