Artificial Intelligence Nanodegree Review
Frequently, people ask me if Udacity’s AIND is worth it. My objective with this post is to give a general overview of what it is, what you get, and if you’re the type of person who will get the most from this Nanodegree.
The Material
The Nanodegree is divided in two terms. The first term is focused in giving you the fundamentals of AI through a lesson+small project approach, while the second term is focused in the most recent advancements of AI, specifically, deep learning. Then, you’ll select a concentration and build a real project using speech recognition, natural language processing, or computer vision. I don’t want to go into detail because most of this can be seen here.
The quality of the material is really high. You can find a lot of this things online. What makes the ND really interesting are the projects. All the projects are designed in a way in which you’ll be able to learn a lot by yourself, read research papers that talk about the material seen in the lessons, and get some real experience in the field. All the projects are reviewed, and you get proper feedback on your results.
The Community
The thing that really stands out of the ND is the community. You get access to a Slack private channel, forums, and to a mentor. The Slack channel is full of interesting people of completely different backgrounds. There are office hours and ama (ask me anything) during the week, so you can learn even more about AI from people working on the field. You can also ask any questions you might have, and the awesome community will jump to help you. The most interesting thing to have is a mentor. Having a mentor means that you get 1:1 chat with a person that will be able to answer your questions, give you further feedback in your projects, and share papers with you. The mentors will be there for you to help you with anything, which is something great to have when you’re just starting to learn about Artificial Intelligence.
Is this for everybody?
First of all, this is not a self-paced course. You are encouraged to complete each project before a deadline, and there is a hard deadline at the end of each term. Finishing everything before the hard deadline means you’ll have access to career services which will help you in getting a job. You’ll need to put 8–15 hours weekly, depending if you have any experience in the field. The projects can be time consuming, so you are expected to jump on them as early as you can. Even if your mentor encourages you to keep going on and finishing on time, you’ll need to put some effort in finding time to keep working consistently. Being part of the ND is not only the material of the lessons. Actually, you can get that for free. What the ND gives you is access to an open, hard working community, an excellent mentorship service that will allow you to learn more than what is given in the ND, and well crafted projects that will allow you to get some real experience. Overall, if your objective is just to learn, the nanodegree might not be for you. If you decide to take it, make use of all the resources that Udacity is giving you, and you’ll be able to learn much more. I hope this post helps people that is not sure if they should take it or not.
