Most engineering students spend four years preparing for placements. Some spend those same years building projects for the global open-source community instead. This year, that difference translated into a ₹3,00,000 stipend paid directly by Google for the prestigious Google Summer of Code (GSoC 2026) to a third-year B.Tech CSE student from Gurugram.

Jayant Parashar, currently in his 6th semester of B.Tech CSE at K.R. Mangalam University (KRMU), was selected as a contributor to GSoC 2026. GSoC is one of the world’s most competitive open-source programmes, where contributors are selected not through exams or campus recruitment drives, but through publicly visible coding contributions, technical proposals, and peer evaluation by experienced engineers.

This blog is not simply about one student’s achievement. It is about what made it possible. A  structured system that KRMU’s School of Engineering and Technology (SOET) has built for exactly this purpose, called the Open Source Mentorship Programme. But before we get into how this mentorship programme works, let’s first shed some light on what GSoC actually is and why getting selected is as difficult as it sounds.

What is Google Summer of Code?

Google Summer of Code is a programme that funds developers to contribute to real open source software projects. It is a stipend-based programme that Google runs for more than 12 weeks. GSoC 2026 is the 22nd season of this programme that has produced over 22,000 contributions from across 123 countries since its inception in 2005. 

This year, 184 of the leading open source organisations participated in GSoC 2026. These participants publish a list of project ideas for which the contributors have to study the codebase, submit pull requests and then write a detailed technical proposal for the project they want to tackle. Mentors from the participating organisations review every proposal and interview shortlisted candidates before making their selections. Only the strongest proposals pass through the process.

As a result, selected candidates earn a credential that carries genuine industry weight. A GSoC selection tells any hiring manager that this person can identify a real problem, design a technical solution, communicate it clearly to experts, and execute it independently.

How Jayant Got Selected in GSoC 2026

Jayant Parashar, a 6th-semester B.Tech CSE student at KRMU’s School of Engineering and Technology, was selected by FOSSASIA, one of the world’s most active open-technology organisations. He was one of the contributors selected from 15,245 applicants from 131 countries in GSoC 2026.                

Jayant has a simple goal – making the lives of PyTorch developers easy. His GSoC 2026 project tackles something that quietly frustrates a lot of people working in deep learning, called manual logging. Every time you run an experiment, you’re tracking loss, accuracy, learning rates, etc., and it’s all done manually. This mundane approach slows you down, and it can be automated. 

So he’s building native autologging directly into Visdom, a tool that many PyTorch developers already utilise for visualisation. Once it’s in place, the tracking happens automatically, in real time, without the researcher having to think about it. It is a clean, simple, and genuine time-saver.

Not only that, this project goes far beyond that. It also includes support for PyTorch Lightning, multi-GPU configuration, and smart experiment versioning. And he’s writing proper documentation throughout, so it’s actually usable in production from day one.

None of this happened overnight. Before he even submitted a proposal, Jayant spent a lot of time scrolling through FOSSASIA’s codebase. He made real contributions, got involved with the community, and built the kind of credibility you can’t fake.

Reflecting on his experience, Jayant shares: “My journey into open source started with contributions to projects like PyTorch, ExecuTorch and Mesa, where I learned how to work with large codebases and collaborate with global developer communities. Through GSoC 2026, I’m contributing to the PyTorch ecosystem by building native autologging integration for Visdom, making experiment tracking and real-time visualisation simpler and more accessible for deep learning researchers.”

The stipend of ₹3,00,000 is paid by Google in two instalments, including 45% upon passing the midterm evaluation and 55% upon successful completion of the final evaluation. Both evaluations are conducted by his assigned FOSSASIA mentor, based on the quality and progress of his code contributions.

SOET’s Open Source Mentorship Programme

When results like Jayant’s occur, there is a temptation to attribute them to individual brilliance. While it is easy to view this as an individual achievement, the bigger story lies in the system that helped make it possible.

KRMU’s School of Engineering and Technology (SOET) runs a dedicated Open Source Mentorship Programme, driven by the SOET Technical Training Team. It is a structured, six-month preparation cycle designed to bridge the gap between classroom learning and real-world software development through open-source contributions on real projects. 

The programme is not limited to GSoC. It prepares students for LFX Mentorship, Summer of Bitcoin, Hacktoberfest, MLH Fellowship, and Outreachy. It builds a portfolio of globally recognised, stipend-based open-source opportunities that most engineering colleges in India do not address at all.

This matters because open-source contribution has become one of the most credible signals an engineering student can send to a prospective employer. A public GitHub profile with merged pull requests in a major project tells a hiring manager something that a marksheet simply cannot. SOET has built the infrastructure to help students build exactly that kind of record.

The Open Source Mentorship Programme, however, is only one part of what KRMU’s SOET has built. The university provides robust facilities and a curriculum aligned with industry demands, fostering a learning environment that sparks a spirit of curiosity and creativity among the students. In addition, KRMU also bridges the gap between academics and industry by providing hands-on exposure through hackathons, live projects, research initiatives, and corporate internships. Students engage in real-world problem-solving, collaborate with industry leaders, participate in technical bootcamps, and gain entrepreneurial insights through startup incubation programmes.

What Does a Google Summer of Code Stipend of ₹3 Lakh Actually Mean?

The ₹3,00,000 that Jayant received from GSoC 2026 is not a scholarship awarded at the end of a degree. It is not a prize from a college competition. It is a professional stipend, earned during the third year of his undergraduate programme, paid by Google to compensate him for delivering a real software project to a real engineering standard. The implications of that are significant, such as the following:

First, the money arrives while the degree is still in progress, providing a meaningful financial return a year before graduation. 

Second, the evaluation was conducted by practising engineers at a global open-source organisation, not by faculty. That distinction matters enormously when a student appears for job interviews later. 

Third, there is no Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), no employment obligation, and no exclusivity clause. The experience, the code, the certification, and the professional network all belong entirely to the student.

For context, many postgraduate stipends in India, including some government research fellowships, pay less per month than what Jayant will receive across this summer. He is still in his third year of a four-year degree.

Conclusion

Jayant Parashar’s GSoC 2026 selection is significant, but the greater significance lies in what it demonstrates about the environment that produced it. KRMU’s School of Engineering and Technology offers multiple industry-aligned B.Tech CSE programmes. The highest placement package to date has been of ₹56.6 LPA and every year, over 800 companies visit the university for campus placements.

The Open Source Mentorship Programme is active and open to students entering SOET in the 2026-27 academic session. The six-month preparation cycle, the technical training team, and the structured pathway to events like GSoC are in place and waiting for the next cohort.

If engineering college options in Delhi NCR are on your list right now, this is the kind of outcome that deserves a closer look. Explore KRMU’s SOET and choose the trajectory for a bright and impactful career for life.