My Bertelsmann Data Science Scholarship Journey

Saumya Tiwari
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read

It started with an innocent mail from Udacity, informing me how I was one of the 15000 candidates to be shortlisted to attempt the challenge course. I was beyond excited and thrilled. It marked my entry into the evergreen field of data science. I was amazed, in simple words.

Quite honestly, my goal on receiving the scholarship was to somehow secure a place in the top 1500 candidates and earn myself a nanodegree.

But life had other plans. I enrolled myself in a career accelerator cum coding bootcamp, which turned out to be way more intense than I imagined. I could not find time to attempt lessons, and when I did, I could not remember what I had studied last time due to the long time gap between the two sessions. My mentors advised me to ignore the challenge course and focus on the bootcamp. And I, sadly, made peace with that.

Now here I was in for a surprise. My Facebook wall and Slack were all flooded with posts and messages from people in distress and other people motivating them. I posted about my situation and was welcomed by such lovely people, who made me believe it was still possible to complete the course on time. I realized the power of community.

I learned so many ways in which people all across the globe tried to collaborate and grow together. Various initiatives like study buddy, tutor-tutee, hangout calls, motivational AMAs came up. Slack channels like ‘turtle-squad’ were formed for people who were overwhelmed by their peers, who were way ahead in terms of percentage of course completed. I had never seen such a positive environment before and I immediately fell in love with it.

Other than gaining an insight into the world of data science, learning about statistics, SQL and falling in love with Python, I connected with so many wonderful people over Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and where not. I met the amazing instructors Kathleen and Dan.

Finally, with the help of the motivation of my fellow peers, I was able to complete the course on time and managed to secure a position on the waitlist. Looking back, one thing I would change would be to collaborate more, network more, learn a little more from my peers and utilize the amazing platform Udacity offers to learn and grow as an individual.

Concluding, I would like to raise my glass to the amazing community created by Udacity and would love to see and be a part of more of them. Cheers!

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