This Week at Udacity, Aug 11 edition
Could anything this week be as exciting as the launch of our Udacity-Bosch hiring challenge?
Possibly. But all the same, we were REALLY excited about this!
To help Bosch meet the demands of their growing Automated Driving team, Udacity is pleased to announce a Path Planning Challenge sponsored by Bosch, which will give actively enrolled students in our Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program the opportunity to showcase their skills and earn an interview for a Planning Engineer role with Bosch’s Automated Driving team.
Translation: enter challenge, win challenge, win interview, get job!
~
We had more great news from our awesome collaborators this week as well. For example, the Samsung VR Team gave us some excellent tips on how to make amazing VR Video, which you can read about here.
And IBM, another great Udacity collaborator, was in Machine Learning news not once but twice this week, with these stories:
Healthcare
Researchers at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center use AI to discern concrete biomarkers for schizophrenia, improving both early diagnosis and symptom prediction.
Industry
IBM opens its machine learning hub in India, similar to its hubs in the US, Canada, China, and Germany, to help local organizations learn to use machine learning.
~
As exciting as the Bosch announcement was, it wasn’t the only launch this week — Episode 3 of The Drawing Board, Udacity’s new podcast, also went live! The episode focuses on gamification, and our guests offered all kinds of great ideas for using gamification strategy to improve retention results.
As but one example of the insights on offer, is this not the best answer ever to the question of why you should incorporate gamifcation strategy into a product offering?
“…so that people will willingly come back to it when they’re waiting for the bus instead of playing Tetris.”
That comes from Gina Gotthilf, VP of Marketing and Growth at Duolingo. You can access the whole episode here.
~
We had the honor of highlighting another wonderful Udacity graduate this week, and you can read her story by following the link below:
Put Your Soul Into It: Lifelong Learning and The Pursuit of Happiness
“Honestly, at first I couldn’t believe it…when they called and said ‘Congratulations, we would like to offer you a position as a Data Analyst,’ I couldn’t concentrate … my mind was on cloud nine, I was just so happy.” —Jennifer Tsou, Data Analyst Nanodegree program graduate
And speaking of amazing Udacity graduates, JP Miller contributed a super-inspirational post to our blog this week:
Forging a new career path boils down to a series of concrete steps you must take to advance your agenda:
1. Catalog your current skills and document your skills gap.
2. Create a written plan of action to fill the gap.
3. Put the plan into action and own full responsibility for the advancement of your career.With discipline and diligence you will progress from where you are, to where you want to be.
You can find JP online here:
Skragglies.com
@therealjpmiller
and now …
Tweet of the Week!
#WITBragDay. We first saw the hashtag here …
… and were subsequently thrilled to see it here:
And THAT … is This Week at Udacity!
