So your inbox lit up yesterday with the email. The proposal worked, the interviews worked, the late-night drafts worked. Take a moment, breathe, tell your family, post the screenshot. You earned it 🎉 Now, the actual fun part begins. GSoC is, at its core, a few months of getting paid to learn from people who have spent years figuring out how to build software that thousands (sometimes millions) of strangers depend on. Think of it as an internship, but instead of a single company, your "office" is the entire open source world, and your "coworkers" are engineers who chose to spend their free time making things better for everyone. That's a rare seat at the table. Don't waste it. Here are a few things to keep in mind so you make the most of it. What a mentor looks for from you They want to mentor, not babysit. Mentors signed up to guide you, answer the hard questions, and unblock you when the codebase fights back. What they did not sign up for is reading the README on your behalf.…