Srishti Srivasthava, final-year student of BTech in Computer Science and Engineering at Amritapuri campus, will soon complete her prestigious Google Summer of Code (GSoC) internship.

Beginning on May 24, 2013 and slated to end on September 29, 2013, the internship provided Srishti with an opportunity to write code for the Mozilla Open-Source Software Foundation during the four-month period.

A global program that offers stipends to write code for open source projects, the Google Summer of Code internship is designed to provide exposure to real-world software development to students, even while they are studying.

The process begins with the potential interns submitting project ideas, complete with abstracts and detailed descriptions. Sristhti submitted a project idea that aimed to improve text selection and rotation features of the PDF plug-in for the Mozilla Firefox web browser. When her idea was chosen, Srishti became the first female student from Amrita to be awarded this opportunity.

Amrita students have been recipients of the GSoC since 2010. Past GSoC awardees from Amrita include Varrun Ramani and Adithya Rao who graduated with BTech CSE degrees in 2010, Zubin Mithra and Prasanth Kumar who were awarded BTech IT degrees in 2011 and Bithin A. who completed his MSc (CS) in 2011.

All these students were mentored by Vipin Pavithran, Assistant Professor, Amrita Center for Cybersecurity.

Sristhi received additional mentoring from Aditya, an alumnus of Amrita Vishwa vidyapeetham, Amritapuri campus presently working in the Department of CIR (Corporate and Industry Relations).

“I feel blessed that I was made aware of such opportunities in which students like me can participate. I hope that next year many more Amrita students can get this internship, and also receive exposure to new, upcoming things,” Srishti shared.

Regarding her work, she explained, “Mozilla Firefox has incorporated a new in-built pdf viewer component, but there are a few issues which need to be fixed and improved in this component. My project revolves around implementing some new features for this component and fixing the existing problems.”

Srishti has mastered many programming languages during her academic tenure and she keeps an eye on the software horizon to stay abreast of changing technologies. She is keenly interested in Android programming and Android application development.

We congratulate her on this achievement and wish her all the best.