If you haven't read my previous post about the pre-GSoC journey the two months of contributing, the early mornings, the proposal drafts I'd suggest starting there. This post picks up right where that one ended: the proposal had been submitted, the deadline had passed, and there was nothing left to do but wait.

Waiting, as it turns out, is its own kind of difficult.

After the Submission

I hit submit at 11:20 PM on March 31st , ten minutes before the deadline. And then, almost immediately, the adrenaline wore off and a very different feeling took its place.

When you're in the middle of writing a proposal, you have something concrete to do:

Sections to draft

Diagrams to make

Timelines to think through

Drafts to improve

The work itself keeps the anxiety at a manageable level because you can always channel it into doing something . But the moment the submission is in and there's nothing more you can do to improve your chances, the anxiety has nowhere to go.…