FAQ

IAP stands for Independent Activities Period, which is MIT’s 4-week long term in January. MIT encourages students to use IAP to set their own educational agendas, work on independent projects, meet with faculty, or pursue many other opportunities not possible during the semester. Many individuals and groups in the MIT community take advantage of IAP to create opportunities for others. Thanks to the unique nature of IAP, Code for Good’s IAP class allows students to focus more time and energy on their projects without the stress and distraction of semester-time classes.

The Consulting program is during the Fall and Spring semesters, while the IAP program is during MIT’s IAP period in January.

Email us and we’ll contact you about possible mentoring opportunities!

We don't have a newsletter, but we occasionally send out updates via our Facebook page, and we update our website every semester with the latest projects.

We would love to hear about potential partnerships or to share stories and advice. Just send us an email (see the "Contact" tab)!

If you are looking to participate in our programs, you can apply for the Spring or Fall consulting programs at the beginning of each semester, or for the IAP program near the end of the Fall semester. The application link for students will posted on the main page of the specific program. If you are looking to join our organizing team, we also recruit during the Fall and Spring semesters. The application will be posted on our site, but you can email us (see the "Contact" tab) and we can remind you to apply when we start recruiting!

Click on the “Apply” tab in the navigation bar of the site. Applications are closed for Fall 2020, however.

Any student who is eligible to register for MIT classes can participate in our programs. This includes students at MIT and cross-registrants from Harvard or Wellesley.

To get the most out of our programs, we recommend that students have some prior programming experience, such as computer science coursework (6.009, 6.148), internships, or personal projects. For students with less experience, it is possible you could join as a team with a more experienced person. If you’re not sure about your level of experience, feel free to email us! Note that programming experience is not necessary for being an organizer.

The consulting application is for the consulting program, where student teams work on a tech-related project for nonprofit groups. The organizer application is for joining our executive board, where we organize the logistics for our programs, and contact nonprofits and company sponsors, but we do not work on tech-related projects.

Yes, you can apply to both! Your applications will not affect each other. If accepted to both, you can choose to accept both, or just one.

Please check out this doc for a description of each committee. Usually new organizers will have the opportunity to explore tasks across multiple committees. We need the most help with the consulting and IAP committees.

Yes, you can apply again! We make acceptances based on your resume project experience, skills, and free time. Your past applications will not affect current or future applications.

The only difference between the IAP and Consulting programs in the time frame. The Consulting program is during the semester, so students will be expected to spend about 2-4 hours a week on their projects. During IAP, student teams will complete a project in a 4-week period by spending 20-40 hours a week on their projects. This program culminates in an exposition, where participants present and showcase their projects to mentors, representatives of the non-profit organizations, and the general MIT community.

Students usually spend a minimum of 2-3 hours on your project per week. We ask students to set realistic milestones to get their projects finished by the end of the term.

We have a weekly hour-long organizer meeting. Outside of this meeting, your tasks might take up to 3 hours during heavy weeks (i.e. program end or beginning), or 30 minutes of lighter weeks.

We accept applications from both teams and individuals. After participants are admitted, we also host team mixers for individuals to find teammates and for teams to get to know each other.

We work with a variety of nonprofits mostly based in Boston that tackle issues of health, nutrition, education, community, finances, housing, and more. Projects are often based in web development, app development, and data transfer, cleaning, analysis and visualization. Check out the past projects tab for examples.

If you're interested in partnering with us, please fill out this interest form, and we'll email you whenever we open applications for nonprofits! We will look at nonprofit applications for consulting in September and January, and applications for IAP in November.

If your nonprofit organization has any problems that require technical skill to solve, we'd be happy to have you apply!

Student teams choose which projects they want to work on based on nonprofits' applications.

Projects are selected based solely on student preference, but successful non-profits tend to have more detailed project descriptions and mission statements that convey more information about the kind of work students will be doing.

Projects should be able to be completed by students spending ~5 hours/week for 8-10 weeks. If you have one large project in mind, you might consider applying for teams to complete different sections of the project between semesters. If you have many small projects, you might consider applying with all and letting student teams choose which of the many they can complete in a semester. Projects should have a clear goal to fix a distinct problem; we don't accept projects involving generic IT support.

If you’re interested in learning about sponsorship opportunities or partnering with us, please reach out to us via email (see the "Contact" tab).

As a sponsor, you'll be helping Code for Good support its consulting programs, where we purchase food for meetings and presentations, technology subscriptions for teams when needed, and swag for members and participants. For all tiers, we'll forward information about your company's events and opportunities to students, and include your logo and company information on our materials. For silver and gold tiers, you'll also receive access to student resumes and contact information for direct communication.

Our consulting programs receive 30-40 applications, and we accept 15-20 students per semester. Since we have two semester programs and one IAP (January) class per year, that means we receive a total of ~130 applications and accept ~70 students total. 95% of applicants are computer science students with various focuses, while the other 5% are business students. Our applicant breakdown by class year is usually around 35% first years, 35% sophomores, 15% juniors, 10% seniors, and 5% graduate students.

We have bronze, silver, and gold sponsorship tiers. For more information, please email us (see the "Contact" tab).

We'd love to hear about your interest in a mentoring or outreach program with us. Please email us (see the "Contact" tab).

We only forward messages to our participants on behalf of Code for Good sponsors.