Everything You Need To Know

What kindergarten, The Codist, and Zen, can teach us about lifelong learning, and becoming anything we want to be.

Lifelong Learning - Kindergarten - Udacity

In 1986, a rather unlikely candidate for celebrity—a Unitarian Universalist minister from Waco, Texas—published a book that ended up spending nearly two years on The New York Times bestseller lists. That book was called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, and the author was Robert Fulghum.

Probably the most famous part of Fulghum’s book today is the 16-item list in which he enumerates the life lessons he learned from those early school days.

On April 4, 2007, Andrew Wulf, author of the blog The Codist, wrote a post in which he leaned on Fulghum’s kindergarten-derived list to produce a list of his own; a list that functions as a sort of programmers manifesto.

The first item on Fulghum’s list is “Share everything.” And here’s what Wulf has to say about that:

career change, Featured, Student Success

Going Further, Exploring On Her Own: Lucia Gonzalez’s Nanodegree-Powered Career Change

A move from London to California offered a great deal of excitement for Lucia Gonzalez and her husband, but getting her career going in a new country proved harder than expected—and then she found Udacity!

Lucia Gonzalez - Udacity - Career Change - Student Success

When Lucia Gonzalez’s husband was offered an exciting new job in San Francisco, the couple leapt at the chance to start a new chapter in their lives. They packed up everything in London and headed to the US. But while they loved their new home, Lucia couldn’t land a job in her field. She searched for six months without success.

Lucia felt stuck, so she started looking outside her comfort zone. It being the Bay Area, tech was everywhere, and she started to think about learning programming. It was a new field, but Lucia was curious. She took some free programs, learned a few basic skills, and was quickly hooked. At the same time, Udacity announced its new Grow with Google Scholarship, offering the opportunity to earn a full scholarship to Udacity’s Front-End Web Developer Nanodegree program. Lucia applied immediately and was ecstatic when she got accepted.

Half a year later, Lucia is a Nanodegree program graduate, and she has landed a Front-End Developer role in the San Francisco Bay Area! We spoke with Lucia recently to hear how she successfully navigated the experience of transitioning careers.

career change, Career Guidance, Featured

Talking the Talk: Discover the mindset shift that leads to successful career change

Learn how to go from wanting to be something, to being that something, and why that’s so important for networking success.

Talking the Talk - Career Change - Udacity

Welcome to Part Two of our series focused on career change! In our first post, we explored the concept of “walking the walk” as it pertains to career change, with the main idea being that it’s not enough to just learn the skills—you have to use them. Why? So that when a new career opportunity emerges, you’ve got evidence of your experience at the ready.

In this post, we’re going to go beyond walking the walk, to discover what it means to “talk the talk,” and we’re going to show you why this concept is so important.

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Amazon SageMaker Comes to Udacity’s Deep Learning Nanodegree Program Classroom

We talk with Dan Romuald Mbanga, Global Lead of Business Development for Amazon AI, about teaching students to use SageMaker for training and deploying deep learning models.

Amazon - AWS - SageMaker - Udacity - Deep Learning

Deep Learning is one of the most exciting technology fields in the world today, and because Udacity’s learning platform is built to allow for maximum adaptability, our Deep Learning Nanodegree program is one of our most dynamic and future-facing programs right now, as we continue to respond to advances in the field by augmenting and enhancing our curriculum.

We are very excited to share details about the latest additions to our program curriculum, which include new content and projects focused on PyTorch and SageMaker. In a recent post by Cezanne Camacho, Curriculum Lead for Udacity’s School of Artificial Intelligence, we discussed new PyTorch content, and today, we’re going to explore how we’ll be teaching students to use SageMaker for training and deploying deep learning models.

To integrate the incredible new content, we teamed up with AWS and the SageMaker team, and in the updated program, students will train and deploy a sentiment analysis model on SageMaker, then connect it to a front end through an API using other AWS services. After deploying a model, students will also learn how to update their model to account for changes in the underlying data used to train their model—an especially valuable skill in industries that continuously collect user data.

To provide a closer look into the world of SageMaker, we spoke recently with Dan Romuald Mbanga, Global Lead of Business Development for Amazon AI, and a leader of business and technical initiatives for Amazon AI platforms.

career change, Career Guidance, Featured

Walking the Walk: How to go from learning the skills, to using the skills, to successfully changing careers

In the first of our three-part series on career change, we look at the principle of “walking the walk,” and explore how demonstrating the skills you’ve learned can differentiate you from the crowd.

Walking the Walk - Changing Careers - Udacity

We recently had the opportunity to explore the topic of career change with two Udacity alums, and learn how they were able to successfully move into new careers. Over the course of three articles, we’re going to draw on these discussions to cover three principles behind making a successful career change: Walking the Walk, Talking the Talk, and Networking with your Network.

Today, we begin with “Walking the Walk!”

career change, Featured, Student Success

Two Years, Four Nanodegree Programs, and a New Career!

In just two years, Ricardo Diaz executed an almost impossibly rapid career transformation. Today, he has a new career as a Machine Learning Engineer in Peru, and this is his story.

Ricardo Diaz - New Career - Student Success - Udacity

Ricardo Diaz is a machine learning engineer. He works for a great company in Peru, and he’s a graduate of no less than four Nanodegree programs! By all measures, he’s a success. But just two years ago, it was a different story. He was still in Venezuela, struggling to learn new skills. He was short of money, and his prospects for making a full-time salary weren’t great.

How did he manage such a rapid and complete career transformation? We chatted with Ricardo recently to find out.

Featured, School of Autonomous Systems, Student Success

A Career in Motion: Darien Martinez Torres, and the road to Autonomous Systems

A passion for learning sent Darien Martinez Torres back to the classroom after twenty years as a developer. Today, this two-time Nanodegree grad works on drones and flying cars!

Darien Martinez Torres - Udacity - Student Success - Autonomous Systems

Darien Martinez Torres has nearly twenty years of experience as a software developer. For much of that time, he has worked as a contractor—jumping from role to to role as opportunities have appeared. He enjoyed the new challenges each job brought, but he also had a nagging sense there was something more out there for him.

When he heard about the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program, he recognized an opportunity to reconnect with subjects he’d learned about years before—such as image and sensor processing. It sounded amazing, but also a challenge—he’d need to balance studying with the demands of work; not to mention family life with three children! Nevertheless, he enrolled and committed to studying hard, collaborating closely with a group of fellow students. He quickly realized that much in the field had changed, and there were many new skills he’d need to learn anew.

Darien has now graduated from two Nanodegree programs, and he’s doing something incredible—he’s collaborating with a group of fellow graduates to put his new skills into immediate practice, and he’s building out his own idea for a platform to share advanced experiments.

We chatted to Darien recently to hear about what drives his passion for learning, and to learn more about his exciting new collaboration.