Meet the GitHub Campus Experts selected for the fall 2022 MLH Fellowship Cohort, powered by GitHub

Sometimes, you just need a little help to contribute to an open source project. While some of us are getting ready for fall festivities, others are starting to make contributions to open source projects. That is the case for Samson Amaugo, Tushar Gupta, and Nathaly Toledo, three GitHub Campus Experts who are joining the fall 2022 batch of the MLH Fellowship. As fellows, they will be working with open source maintainers and getting real-world experience on managing a project.

The MLH Fellowship is a twelve-week program where students get assigned to open source projects and mentors who are ready and willing (and excited!) to help them make open source contributions. It helps to learn the process behind popular open source projects and the work that maintainers go through. At the end of the program, students contribute to major projects on GitHub, which are used by developers around the world. Check out the feedback from one of our maintainers and GitHub staff member about her experience working with a MLH Fellow during our last cohort.

This cohort is special as its our first to be entirely made of Campus Experts. GitHub Campus Experts were carefully selected from the student community to join MLH’s Fellowship cohort. Campus Experts are student leaders that strive to build diverse and inclusive spaces to learn skills, share their experiences, and build projects together. They can be found across the globe leading in-person and online conferences, meetups, and hackathons, and maintaining open source projects.

We were fortunate enough to sit down with the Campus Experts and ask them about their experience and goals with the program.

Meet the Fellows 🎊

Samson Amaugo

GitHub Handle: @sammychinedu2ky

How has your Campus Expert experience prepared you for the Fellowship?

“Being a Campus Expert comes with some tech advocacy responsibilities which also translates to some of the acknowledged skills needed to succeed in the Fellowship. Some of the skills include being able to communicate and collaborate with peers and also the ability to learn new technologies. I look forward to also improving on these areas during my stay in the Fellowship.”

What are you hoping to learn from the Fellowship experience?

The opportunity and privilege of meeting and working with people from different cultures, spheres of life and mixed-tech backgrounds creates an environment where I am fortunate to learn not only from the project managers, but also from my pod mates. I aspire to develop my soft skills and also improve on my project management and contribution dynamics.

Tushar Gupta

GitHub Handle: @tushar5526

How has your Campus Expert experience prepared you for the Fellowship?

Campus Experts helped me get unique insights into the community culture. The experience and exposure from Campus Experts helped shape an impactful essay, which eventually led to my applications for the MLH Fellowship always being able to clear the initial screening processes.

Both of these programs have the same core values—that is working for the growth and betterment of the community. So, my experience at Campus Experts automatically modeled my thought process, mind and values to resonate with the values of the program. Thus, the interviews and the whole process felt very natural and an easy fit for me.

What are you hoping to learn from the Fellowship experience?

I am really looking forward to interacting with super-talented Fellows all around the globe and learning from their experiences and innovative ways of problem-solving. Also, getting hands-on experience on real-world projects and picking up skills like teamwork, effective communication, and working on different tech stacks excites me to the core. I am hoping that the time at the Fellowship will help me get a better understanding of how software is ideated, developed and managed for real-world use cases.

Nathaly Toledo

GitHub Handle: @ahn-nath

How has your Campus Expert experience prepared you for the Fellowship?

Prior to my role as a Campus Expert, I was rejected four times for the Fellowship. Part of it, I believe, is how I focused entirely on my technical skills. The Campus Experts program has helped me look at other aspects of my career and role in communities. It helped me build soft skills that not only make my profile much more robust, but also make me communicate my value with more confidence and eloquence. It also added more meaning to the use of my skills and the purpose of my leadership in tech, which should go beyond being good at coding.

What are you hoping to learn from the Fellowship experience?

I am looking forward to discussing and learning from top talent on how to troubleshoot and go about finding a solution to technical issues and taunting challenges while collaborating with other Fellows. I am also looking forward to working with professional mentors who will help me be aware of my weakness and of the level I need to reach to build top-level software as an engineer. Finally, I almost can’t wait for it to start, as I think that it is highly likely to go beyond my expectations.

We’re looking forward to tracking the progress of the Campus Experts throughout their journey.

Happy hacking!