While books and lectures are essential, there's nothing like real world experience, and that's what Facebook's Open Academy offers to budding software developers. The initiative, which debuted as a pilot program at Stanford, has now expanded to 22 universities' computer science departments across the globe.
Open Academy is aimed at helping computer science students in preparing for jobs in the industry. Due to the social networking giant’s tie up with various computer science universities, a special class has been set up where students can get college credit for various open source projects.It not only gives students a chance to work on real open source projects like Ruby On Rails and Mozilla Open Badges, it also pairs them up with mentors for guidance.
While the program is aimed at helping students get ready for jobs, it is also meant to help Facebook in hiring the best young coders coming out of universities.
If you'd like to get involved, or bring the program to your university, check out the program's Facebook page for contact information -- but hurry, the 2014 winter session kicks off in February.
