Udacity Bertelsmann Data Science Challenge Scholarship

I’m not sure how it all started, may be I got a promotional email, saw an FB post or clicked on an Add. But in April 2018 I found out that Udacity is partnering with Bertelsmann to offer 15,000 students the opportunity to earn a data science scholarship. I was in the middle of a career break taking care of my baby as a first time mom and was thinking of taking up data science as an independent study. I applied straightway and was delighted to be selected.

 A diverse group of people from all over the world were selected and were enrolled in a 3-month challenge course consisting of Stat, Python and SQL. Out of 15,000 candidates only 1500 were to be selected for the nanodegree scholarship and the selection was based on completion of challenge course plus contribution to the community.

Usually online education can be pretty lonely and boring. But it was not the case in here. Lively online and social media communities were formed in Slack and Facebook and the Slack channels were overflowing with informative and interesting discussions throughout the day. Friendly community managers came up with creative ways to keep the community engaged.

I knew I just didn’t have the luxury of spending hours online to add my contribution. I was busy with a demanding toddler and my family was to migrate in July, right in the middle of the course duration (June-August).  I had to come up with a way to finish up the coursework and add value within the first few weeks. Then came the Eureka moment, since I had no choice but finish the course in first few weeks and also since I have a terrible memory why don’t I make course notes and share it with everyone? There was no material in written form anyway and the course was mainly in the video/quiz form which made it even more worthwhile.

After 2 weeks I had neatly compiled the course content into a pdf file and shared it. It was an instant hit and I was happy to get some lovely feedback. There were permission requests to translate the note into several other languages as well.

Find it here!

Next two months were full of chaos with the migration and by August we were finally settled in Sydney, Australia. As anticipated I couldn’t even login to Slack or course forums.

Three days back I got the email congratulating me on being selected to the Data Science NanoDegree. The plan had worked.