Informal chats: career advice from people involved in Open-Source projects

This past week I had the pleasure to chat with Yo Yehudi and Pavithra Eswaramoorthy. Both of them currently work in Open Source projects. 

Yo Yehudi is currently working in Open Life Science, a mentorship program for scientific researchers. It was very interesting to talk with someone that is in contact with academia. As a computer science major, I always wonder if I want to dedicate myself to academia when I graduate. But I also know that academia can be tough. Yo gave me a better view of what a career in academia can look like and also through their experience taught me that there are many ways to approach academia. Hearing about their experience as someone who’s worked in the industry but also in academia was very valuable. We also talked about her work at Open Life Science and what’s exactly Open Science. Yo shared with me the contact of some Argentinians who are involved in Open Science and some of them even work at my university! Yo also shared with me a conference here in Buenos Aires where I can meet some of these researchers and offered to introduce me to them. Definitely, I didn’t expect all this from a 30 min chat. 

Pavithra Eswaramoorthy is a developer advocate at Quansight. This role let her keep contributing to Open Source and being paid for it. She participated in Google Summer of Docs and was an Outreachy mentor. She shared her path in Open-Source from being a contributor during college to finding paid opportunities afterward. Hearing her story was incredibly valuable to me because I am interested in following a similar path. Also as a contributor to Bokeh (a python visualization package), she is in contact with the scientific Python community which I’m very interested in as NetworkX is part of that community. She also shared how it felt to choose a different path than most of her classmates during college and gave some tips about how to find a paid job in Open-Source. We also talk about conferences and how that could be a way to meet people working on similar projects especially when you work remotely. Finally, she shared an internship program that I’m much interested in. 

When I first reach out to people I was nervous. I didn’t know what to expect. I am not normally a shy person at all but still, this felt outside of my comfort zone. This feeling disappeared the moment I join the zoom calls and meet these incredible people. Both Yo and Pavithra were very friendly and were very invested in trying to help me in any way they could. I am so glad that I meet them. Definitely, during these informal chats, I got very good advice. Now I have better tools to approach my future as an Open Source contributor.

-Paula