Google Summer of Code recently announced that 185 open source projects had been selected for participation as mentoring organizations for 2025.  One of those pleased to be selected is the Rust Foundation, for whom this is only the second year.

We are now well into the period during which would-be Google SoC contributors should be preparing to send in their proposals, with this year's application period running from March 24th to April 8.

  As stated on the GSoC home page:

It is very important to reach out to the organizations that you are interested in as soon as possible. The more conversations you have with the community before you submit your proposal the better your chances of being selected into the GSoC.

The initial stage of course is to find the combination of the Open Source organisation you want to work with and a project idea that you want to work on. For this you are looking for something that is of interest to you and seems within you capabilities - bearing in mind that you'll be expanding you capabilities by engaging in GSoC. 

For choosing a mentoring organization The advice given in Making First Contact of section of the GSoC Contributor Guide is:

Engage with multiple communities once the participating organizations are chosen to get a feel for how different groups work and find the one or two that fit your interests/personality.

Based on the experience of its first year of being a mentoring organisation Rust has put together very helpful advice for how to structure a project proposal in order to  increase the chance of your project proposal being accepted on its GitHub GSoc repo and it includes some advice about choosing what to work on

You should start by deciding on which project do you want to work on. You can use our list of project ideas as an inspiration, or you can come up with your own project idea. However, you should keep in mind that each GSoC project needs at least one mentor available. Therefore, if you come up with a completely  new project idea, you should also try to find someone from the Rust community who could mentor you on the project.

While this seems specific to Rust every mentoring organization has a comparable GitHub repo with a list of ideas.

Rust's advice for creating a project proposal is comprehensive and well thought out and well worth consulting. 

Advice from Google that is well worth following is

Submit your proposal early during the application period so that the organization mentors can review it and ask you questions or request more detail on aspects of your proposal before the final deadline. You can edit the proposal as many times as you wish before the application deadline. You may even want to label the proposal as a draft so it is clear you are looking for feedback before submitting the final proposal. 

GSoC contributors are allowed to submit up to 3 proposals each year, and they can be to multiple organizations. New in 2025, is that the GSoC applicants will be able to rank their proposals with their #1, #2 and #3 preferences. Only Google Admins will be able to see these preferences and they will be considered but not guaranteed.  

A final bit of advice from Google strikes me as important:

Don’t forget to make your case for a benefit to the organization, not just to yourself. Why would Google and your organization be proud to sponsor this work? How would open source or society as a whole benefit? What cool things would be demonstrated?   

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