I used to conduct interviews at my previous company. We asked a programming question that nobody was able to fully answer in the first go, so seeing how far a candidate got and how well they explained their thought process was a gauge of their ability. My suspicion is that someone well versed in SICP's exercises would do very well on that exercise, as it involved parsing text into an appropriate data structure and subsequently performing operations on that data structure.
SICP will serve you well in interviewing, and don't worry so much about OSS projects, most people aren't involved with OS S when they are just out of school (I think older programmers make the best OSS contributors, but that is a personal opinion).
SICP will serve you well in interviewing, and don't worry so much about OSS projects, most people aren't involved with OS S when they are just out of school (I think older programmers make the best OSS contributors, but that is a personal opinion).