Udacity’s Google Mobile Web Scholarship Program & its glorious effects!

7 min readApr 4, 2018

Motivation

During Google I/O 2017, I came across a new buzzword named Progressive Web Apps (PWA). My inquisitive mind saw some demos of it and my reactions after that:

I literally jumped like a 5-year-old kid who found a new toy to play with!

I always wanted the Web to have Offline First capabilities with an App-Like experience just like the Android applications which I use on my phone like Splitwise, WhatsApp, Facebook etc. I immediately decided to self-study in this area and started with the related courses from the following link:

Google Developers Training | Google Developers

The Mobile Web Specialist Certification tests your skills in developing for the mobile web. You'll write code to…

developers.google.com

Scholarship Applications Open For India

I got the news back in December 2017 while taking the Udacity course for Client-Server communications. It said to apply for Google India Challenge Scholarship for any one of the four tracks:

Front-End Web Developer
Mobile Web Specialist
Android Basics
Android Developer

My eyes literally lit up on seeing this mail! I applied straight away for Mobile Web Specialist track. The results would be announced in February, so, there was some waiting to do.

The Moment Of Truth

I received an email on 7th of February which read as follows:

“Congratulations Anurag!
Hi Anurag,
We are excited to offer you a Google India Challenge Scholarship for the Mobile Web Specialist track. We received applications from many talented and motivated candidates, and yours truly stood out.”

The mail also had the following cool badge:

My initial thoughts and reactions?

Is it really for me? It does state my name on it.
Is this a dream? Let’s live it!
Thank you so much Google and Udacity for this opportunity. It’s time to make the best use of it!

February 14th was the starting date of the course. A perfect date with the Web indeed. 😉

The Challenge Ride

It brought a unique change in me from the start:

I was checking notifications on Slack and Udacity forums instead of WhatsApp and Facebook.

A drastic change indeed, but not the only one.

Since I was into Udacity courses from beforehand, my progress for the challenge course was around 50% complete initially. Offline Web Applications and ES6 are the main topics. As of now, I have completed the course with all the quizzes but it does not end here. The main challenge of this scholarship lies with the contribution to the community.

How can we give back to the community every day?
How can we solve problems of our fellow classmates?
There are many newcomers to Web development too and they would definitely need guidance. How can this experience be made better by us?

These were the real questions which needed answers and it could only be given by us.

Right from the beginning, I started answering doubts of my classmates from basics of JavaScript to Node.js, Gulp related bundling queries, hands-on problems regarding service worker usage, IndexedDB with the new idb library, encouraging and motivational answers and many more!

I literally dived into all the questions that kept coming and tried to provide solutions to them in the easiest language possible. By stepping out of the comfort zone one knows how much to push oneself in order to make things happen! This has become a daily routine thanks to the passionate drive of my classmates. 🙌

While answering queries, I found my ability to help solve problems in an online community. I was humbled by the replies I received and how some expressed their gratitude towards me by saying things like
“People like you are who we look up to” or “You explained it so easily!”.
These replies constantly remind me of how much I love to contribute back to the community.

The interactions I’ve had and the friends I’ve made has been monumental!
I have made connections and also started talking to people individually.

During these 50 days, I have learned so much from my fellow classmates in the community. Each person is unique and has their own struggles.
On seeing such people around me, it really helped me to push beyond my limits. I wrote my first story on medium, shared project ideas, showcased some of my side projects, participated in quizzes organized by classmates.
Next up will be the collaborative projects which all of us are eagerly looking forward to.

Here is the link to the first story I wrote:

Introduction to Polyfills & their Usage

The Web had a beginning but it won’t have an end. As new technologies come out they won’t be supported by the older…

medium.com

It’s exciting to see people of different age groups participating, all having one goal in mind, i.e., to make the Web a better and more useful place by building simple yet powerful and usable applications. I cannot thank Udacity and Google enough for this opportunity.

Scholarship Update

I received the full 6 months scholarship to Mobile Web Specialist Nanodegree! It was one of those courses which I had always wanted to take since I had been passionate about Mobile First Responsive Web applications.

Scholarship Project Challenges

Mobile Web Specialist Program had 3 Project Completion challenges. These challenges were based on the quality of code written for each project and all the participants were thoroughly judged on how far we outweighed the minimum requirements of the project as well.

I won two out of the 3 challenges and received amazing goodies and Scholarship Badges! Here they are:

I also won some amazing goodies from Google & Udacity. These guys really made my day by sending pendrives of 16 gb, Google & Udacity pens, notebooks and of course a Scholarship T-shirt too!

Graduation

I graduated from the program on 27th of September 2018.

I have learnt a lot from my peers throughout the 9 months of stay. Met some really talented people with whom I have kept in touch with as well. I humbly Thank Google & Udacity for all the great moments I’ve had and further thank them for choosing me as a student of this wonderful program. 🙏

Conclusion

I’ve always wanted to get enrolled in the nanodegree programs offered by Udacity since my college days especially related to Web Development and Machine Learning. I used to take courses online on Udacity and started working on the mobile web development track with the free courses like
JavaScript Promises, Offline Web Applications, ES6, Responsive Web Design, Client-Server Communications.

Being a 10 am– 7 pm working individual with a lot of work at the office and balancing Slack and Udacity forums simultaneously were quite a difficult task. Also from the remaining hours, we need to cook, eat and sleep as well to maintain the rhythm for the next day.

Nevertheless, my passion for learning and coding never stopped me and I always found time for it. Just like how I started writing this blog post.

It has always been a dream for me to interact with like-minded people and discuss tech all the way. I tend to do the same at my workplace with my colleagues, but never found such an opportunity to interact with so many
like-minded people all at once.

Whenever I meet tech people I always like to know what they are currently doing and eagerly learn from them. I also share my knowledge regarding the field of Web and let people know about which areas to focus on. Currently, at my workplace, I am making people aware of the concepts of PWA (Progressive Web Applications) and the future it holds. Instead of using heavy frameworks like Bootstrap I tell people to go for Flexbox and Media Queries for front-end responsive web design and make use of more vanilla tech.

If you like this story do clap and let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Kudos to you guys for the read! 😃