The MLH Fellowship is a 12-week remote internship-style tech program. The MLH Fellowship Prep Program is a 3-week version of the fellowship.
After I confirmed my enrollment into the program, I was put into a Pod of 13 Fellows. Below, I will describe what the program was like for me. More info about the application process here. Note that I was part of a summer 2022 batch; the program may have changed since then.
Meetings/Talks
Every weekday during the three weeks there was a meeting. These meetings all started at the same time of day. The first meeting was about an hour long, as we got introduced to the program. Every meeting after that was a 15-min standup, except for Fridays where we did retrospectives for about 30 mins. The standups were used to talk about what we each did during the last 24 hours. The retrospectives allowed us each to discuss what went well, what blockers we faced, and what went poorly during the past week.
For the second half of the program we stopped doing standups. Instead, we were tasked with doing Lightning Talks, where we would use 15 mins to present a topic of choice individually or as a group to the rest of the Pod. People gave very interesting talks about APIs, UI/UX, machine learning, etc.
Projects
We worked together on two projects during the program. The first week we worked on a portfolio website built with Jekyll. The remaining two weeks we worked on a React weather app.
We were paired up to work on GitHub issues. We each forked the main repo and submitted pull requests when we wanted to update the main code. As examples of what the issues were like, for the portfolio, I worked on making a profile page for each Fellow, and for the weather app I worked on improving the website’s responsiveness.
I felt that the projects weren’t technically challenging. I didn’t know Jekyll or React before the program, but I was still able to solve the issues quite quickly. The projects were probably kept simple since three weeks isn’t a lot of time.
Sometimes it was frustrating working with such a large group on these small projects, because I felt like I was spending more time trying to resolve conflicts on my pull requests than actually coding. Nevertheless, working on the projects with the other Fellows was a good way experience collaboration, especially since we occasionally reviewed each others’ code and gave each other feedback.
Final thoughts
Ultimately, I think this is a good program for someone wanting to prepare for the full 12-week program or their first internship.
Feel free to reach out to me for a chat or if you have any questions/comments:)
