Google wrapped up its eighth Summer of Code a couple of weeks ago, with over 1200 college students — its largest cohort yet — participating in the three-month-long program. The Summer of Code puts these students to work in real world, open source development projects. While most program participants are computer science and engineering majors, the breadth of their backgrounds — academic and otherwise — is quite large, says Google, with students from over 66 countries taking part in the online program.

The purpose, according to Google, is to give students an opportunity (and a small stipend) to write code for various open source projects and more broadly help connect student programmers with the open source community — with organizations and with other developers. These organizations include the Apache Software Foundation, Creative Commons, Mozilla, OpenStreetMap, the Wikimedia Foundation, and CERN. There are other, less well-known organizations with which students can work too, and Google says that while some students are drawn to working with some of the high profile ones, many choose the organization they work with because of their own programming interests and because of the specific project they get to undertake.

Such is the case with Eamon Ford, a junior at the University of Chicago, who spent the summer working on iOS apps for CERN.

Read the rest of the story over on Inside Higher Ed