alexanderstran
commented
10 years ago Hi @hirshjain, thanks for your thoughtful question.
As you may know, many of our fellows do not contribute coding as their primary contribution to their team. However, as I may have touched on in other answers, the fellowship teams act a bit like little startups, with different individuals leading design, stakeholder management, development, communications, etc, but everyone really pitching in. Therefore, if someone was really talented at product management but really wasn't an ace coder, that's OK as long as they are excited and willing to have a general literacy of coding and contribute to the code base in terms of content and discussions of the architecture of an application. Others can comment from a more technical standpoint, but there is definitely a space for folks who are more skilled in the management side of things as long as they understand that they must communicate with their team and contribute to a code base, as if they were in a small startup. I hope that makes sense. If you want a great example of this, look up our fellow Jeremiah Kimelman, who has product and dev evangelism skills as his main skill set, but also contributes to the codebase.
mollymcleod
Hi all,
This issue has been discussed to varying degrees in other threads, but I wanted to ask it a little bit more explicitly. Any insight from previous fellows or others would be very much appreciated!
I recently submitted by my application for the 2015 fellowship. I applied despite the fact that I have limited coding experience/a non-technical educational background, because having researched the fellowship and read about the experiences of other fellows, it seemed that it was too compelling of an opportunity to simply pass up (the opportunity to work on a high-impact initiative with a public service orientation alongside talented and driven people just seems really cool).
To briefly describe my background -- I have a law degree (with a focus on local government law), worked in management consulting for a couple years (with some time as a project manager) and have also worked with local governments both in the US and abroad on a variety of public service projects. For these reasons, the fellowship seems to be an incredibly exciting opportunity, one that I would really love the chance to participate in. At the same time, I recognize that I am about the farthest thing from an engineer; I have only recently have started introducing myself to the world of coding, seeing it as an increasingly important skill set to have. While I plan to put in substantial effort to further develop such skills, obviously this puts me in an entirely different ballpark than many other applicants (e.g. a Google engineer), who would seem to have a much more relevant skill set than I do.
I've been reflecting, then, on how realistic a shot I have at being selected for the fellowship. While I'm heartened by the fact that the application suggests they are looking for people with "diverse backgrounds", I don't want to convince myself into thinking I have a chance at being selected, if in fact I do not. Anyways, I know it is difficult to say anything definitively about an applicant's chances, but any insight that anyone could provide on how I should be thinking about this (e.g. "sorry, but you're in a tough spot" or "you may have a shot if you familiarize yourself with X, Y, Z") would be much appreciated.
Thanks very much in advance!