Featured, School of Data Science, Student Success

Richa Changed Her Whole Life in One Year! Here’s How She Did It.

We’re already into the second week of 2019 and want to share another story of how our students have built new skills, landed new jobs, and totally changed their lives. So let us introduce you to Richa Maheshwari.

Last year was a great year for Richa. She began married life, she moved from India to Malaysia, and she made a major career move—from journalism to working with data—after studying with Udacity! We recently got the opportunity to chat with her to learn how she changed the direction of her life so successfully in just twelve months.

Featured, Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program, Student Success

How Nicola Started Off 2019 in His Dream Job

It’s 2019, it’s a brand-new year, and it’s the time when many of us start planning major changes in our lives. Whether you are thinking about learning new skills, changing your career, or landing a fresh opportunity at your employer, this is the time of year to make that happen.

Udacity New Skills Student Success Quote

Nicola Poerio changed his life when he landed a new role in the self-driving car division of his employer, Fiat Chrysler, without any previous work experience in autonomous systems engineering. All after building his skills with Udacity.

Nicola had been working in the automotive industry for over ten years as an engineer. He’d built a career he calls “satisfactory” at Fiat Chrysler, one of the world’s biggest automotive companies. And he’d done well in his work, taking on new projects and management responsibilities along the way.

career change, Featured, Student Success

A Moving Career Change

20 years of hard-earned experience managing the logistics of military relocations led to a programming career helping other military families move more easily!

While it’s not necessarily thought of as a conventional “career,” 20 years of organizing regular house moves for her military family (including four children!) has been a LOT of work for Kimberly McCaffrey. She has managed a constant cycle of organizing movers, schools, housing, and logistics, in whatever location the Navy sent them next. When her husband decided to retire, Kimberly knew everything was about to change, and so she started on an exciting new journey—embracing her childhood fascination with computers and launching a career as a programmer. Along the way she won a hackathon, and is now building a new app focused on a subject she knows very well—helping military families relocate!

We were lucky enough to chat with Kimberly to hear about her experiences learning to program, and what she plans to do next.

Featured, Student Success, Year in Review

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.

Featured, Machine Learning Engineer Nanodegree Program, School of AI, School of Autonomous Systems, Student Success

The Race to a Machine Learning Career

This Udacity Nanodegree program graduate enacted a full-scale career change to become a Machine Learning Engineer.

Meet Robin Stringer. Robin worked as a journalist, a translator, and a marathon race guide for visually-impaired athletes, before a conversation about coding caused him to reevaluate his long-term career plans.

While he was working for a para-athletics non-profit in New York, he began learning Python online, and in the course of doing so discovered Udacity’s programs. He moved to Seattle and took the opportunity to pursue his coding studies full-time, with the goal of pulling off an audacious career change. After studying some of Udacity’s free courses, he started the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program and got his first taste of machine learning. After a lot of work, he successfully landed a full-time role as a machine learning engineer.

We chatted with Robin to learn how he made his career change happen.

Featured, Student Success

The Audacity to Change

How a 6-month technology course at Udacity helped Anna Preis — and thousands of other people this year — change her life through a new career in tech.

Udacity - The Audacity to Change

Eight years ago, Anna Preis, originally from Poland, found herself in Dublin, Ireland, in a dead-end job working the phones for a payday lender. She hated getting people to take out high-interest loans she knew they could never afford to repay, but she had to meet her quotas to keep her job. “It was heart destroying,” she says. She talked to customers all day long but was never able to truly help them. A string of customer service and customer retention jobs followed, until late last year when a particularly awful day at work caused her to question everything. “I wanted to do something about my life,” she says.

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.