Hi,
I am a student at TU Wien (Vienna, Austria) and currently writing my Bachelor Thesis. I love low-level programming (esp. using C on Unix) and I also specialised on automated code validation as much as possible (which is part of my Bachelor Thesis).
While I am new to working on font rendering, I do have a high appreciation for this topic due to a professional background in web design. Naturally, lots of things came together, when I browsed your list of project ideas and found the idea of developing a testing framework - this sounds like an amazing way for me to explore a new topic!
Apart from that I pick up things and ideas very quickly and would, should you accept my proposal in April, read into the concepts and ideas of font rendering until May; I know a professor to ask about this already. I faced a similar situation with GSoC last year where I worked on Mono and got accustomed to a large and previously unknown code base with many new ideas/concepts extremely quickly.
I would really love to be part of FreeType this summer but, due to my lack of experience with font rendering in general, I wonder if you think that I am a good fit to you?
Thanks for all your thoughts in advance! :)
Best regards
Armin