Author: Christopher Watkins

Christopher Watkins is Senior Writer and Chief Words Officer at Udacity. He types on a MacBook or iPad by day, and either an Underwood, Remington, or Royal by night. He carries a Moleskine everywhere.
Announcements, Featured Blogs

What You Read in 2018

In a year of inspiring student success stories, exciting new scholarship opportunities, and groundbreaking Nanodegree program launches, these are the stories that truly captured your attention.

Udacity - What You Read in 2018

Summing up an entire year of learning, achievement, and success, is an essentially impossible task. That’s perhaps why we never end up producing just one definitive Year-in-Review post—there’s just too much to talk about, and too many perspectives from which to view a year’s worth of accomplishment.

Already this year Sebastian Thrun has written “The Audacity to Change,” which included a wonderful “2018: Udacity by the Numbers” infographic. And last week it was our honor and pleasure to publish “2018: A Year of Student Success,” in which we revisited 12 Udacity students previously featured on our blog, to see how their lives are progressing today. (Spoiler alert: they’re doing great!)

Which brings us to this post!

Here, we’re going to look at the blog articles we published in 2018 that resonated the most with you, our community. These are the stories the greatest numbers of you read, re-read, shared, and commented on.

Before we look at specifics, however, I would just like to take a moment to thank every single one of you who’ve read something we’ve published this year. Thank you for giving us your attention, your time, and your trust. As a learning institution devoted to your career success, we know we only succeed when you succeed. The same can essentially be said for our writing efforts—we only succeed when what we’ve written means something to you.

So with that said, let’s look at the articles you read the most! And why not start right at the top? This is 2018’s most-read post:

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Announcements, Featured Blogs

2018: A Year of Student Success

Join us as we catch up with Udacity students previously featured on our blog, to see what they’re working on today. 

The end of a calendar year is traditionally a time for both reflection and prediction. At Udacity, our reflections and predictions focus on you—what you’ve done, and what you’ll do next.

Below, we revisit twelve Udacity students previously featured on our blog, to discover how things are progressing in their lives today.

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Career Guidance, Featured Blogs

Networking with your Network: Walk it, Talk it, Work it

Learn how to network like the whole world is watching in the third post of our three-part series on career change.

Udacity - Networking with your Network - Career Change

In our two previous posts, we’ve discussed three key principles related to the process of career change. We’ve explored “Walking the Walk” and “Talking the Talk,” and today, we’ll look at our third principle: “Networking with your Network.”

We’ve had two wonderful Udacity alums joining us for our conversations on these topics: Jamaal Davis, a graduate of our Digital Marketing Nanodegree program, and two-time Nanodegree program graduate Xi Palazzolo. To get started on today’s third principle, we’ll turn to Xi for a perfect opening statement:

I love using LinkedIn, and when I felt that I was ready to make my next move, I reached out to a lot of my LinkedIn contacts to ask them, “What kind of skill set do you think is important for someone to succeed, or excel, in this position?”

Now, let’s take this process one step at a time.

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Featured Blogs, Learning and Motivation

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:

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Career Guidance, Featured Blogs

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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Career Guidance, Featured Blogs

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!”

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Career Guidance

3 Tips on How to Manage Fast-Paced Learning

Learn More

Prioritizing your time, planning ahead, and relying on your community can help you successfully manage a fast-paced learning experience.

Fast-Paced Learning - Udacity

It’s one thing to know going in that a Nanodegree program is all about focused learning. It’s another thing altogether to actually experience firsthand what fast-paced learning is really like.

When we talk about our programs being compact, efficient, and effective, we mean that every minute of your classroom time is optimized for maximum learning. It’s what makes skills acquisition at this level possible, and it’s why you enrolled. But the realities can be intense. Things move fast, the projects can be difficult, and you are challenged at every point to do your very best work.

When it’s all over and done and you’ve successfully graduated, your skills will be at a whole new level, as will your confidence. But while you’re in progress, you may feel overwhelmed. The following tips can help you successfully contend with a fast-paced learning environment.

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