Tips on applying for one of Drupal's GSoC slots

Just had a discussion on IRC with a potential student, and wanted to make sure some of these things made their way into a more central place. Mentors, past students, etc. feel free to add to this list.

• Google Summer of Code slots are scarce resources, a rare chance for our community to inject funding and passion into areas that for whatever reason are not getting due attention from our volunteer resources. As such, well-written proposals for projects that fill gaping holes have a much better chance of being accepted. Try to find an intersection between your interests and what the community really needs.
• Don't be shy to interact with the Drupal community! Talk to us on IRC and here in this group, try your hand at some Novice issues, review some, play bug bingo or patch bingo to get a feel for how our community operates. Not only does it help you ensure that the Drupal community's a good fit for you, but it will save you time in the application process by focusing appropriately, and it also helps application reviewers feel much more comfortable recommending your project if they feel like they "know" you through conversations and seeing your work in action.
• The Drupal community has a strong focus on "collaborate together on one really awesome thing" rather than "offer 4-5 variations of the same thing, each slightly different from one another." If you are applying for a project that duplicates existing work in the community (for example, Yet Another Image Gallery Module), your proposal will probably be declined unless you can make a very strong case for why your project fills a niche that none of the others do, and is better to be a separate project than patches/improvements to an existing project.
• If your project entails extending a Drupal-based project whose development is not housed on Drupal.org (for example, various Drupal distributions or modules hosted off-site), be aware that this will raise red flags with some of the proposal reviewers. The reason is that these are Drupal's Google Summer of Code slots, and as such the goal is to have developers working here on drupal.org using the same tools as the rest of the community, in the hopes they will become long-term participants, as many past Summer of Code students have. So if your project revolves around extending a distribution such as Open Atrium, for example, make sure that the module you're building will be developed here on drupal.org, will be built a generic tool that will be of use on a wide variety of Drupal sites, and then, as an added bonus, can be plugged into OA.