Criteria

Once proposals have been finalised, student proposals will be graded based on the following criteria:

Understanding

  • Does the proposal accurately address the project area?
  • Nice bonus features in addition to the main project = good, ONLY unrelated ‘bonus’ features = bad.
  • Clear evidence of communication skills

Plan

  • Does the proposal have a realistic timeline?
  • Does the student have enought time in the week to carry our their plan?
  • Bonus for “what if things go wrong planning”, e.g. bonus features towards the end of the plan that can be removed if/when the bugs strike.

Resourcefulness

  • Can the student carry out tasks on their own over a three month period?
  • Lower points for gross overcommunication (“what should I name this variable?”), better if they quietly and competently get the job done but interact at appropriate times, e.g. InterMine bugs, sensible progress reports.
  • Is the student capable of following existing guidelines and instructions where appropriate?

Experience

  • Does the student have reasonable evidence they’ve competently done something relevant to this before? e.g. one or more of
    • a GitHub profile,
    • pull requests on InterMine’s repos
    • published applications
    • code from a uni assignment?
  • Note: we don’t require a PR to an intermine project. It’s handy as a source of evidence, but any of the others should do just fine.
  • Absolutely no work available - not even a published app, some work experience, or code from a class assignment, is a red flag.

How the ranking process works

All students with a finalised proposal will have their proposals reviewed by one or more mentors in the organisation, and ranked out of 10 based on the criteria above. This score will also be averaged to provide a mean result. These scores are not the final acceptance criteria - so a 9.1 won’t automatically win over an 8.6 - but they do help provide general guidelines for the mentors who are choosing from a large body of qualified students.

Accepted students

Students will be notified of their acceptance by Google when all accepted students are announced, and will not be notified of their internal grades. Please note that we usually have more highly qualified applicants than slots available for the organisation, so sometimes proposals that are genuinely very good have to be rejected. We genuinely wish we could take you all!