We had over 11,000 students apply to join the Udacity Self-Driving Car Nanodegree program, which launches its first cohort this month!
The quality of the students has been astounding. It’s both incredibly exciting and, honestly, intimidating to be teaching students this talented and accomplished. Many of students who applied already work on autonomous vehicles, and want to take the course to make sure they’re at the top of their game. Others are top engineers at companies like Google and Facebook, and still others are stars at universities (including professors!) in the US and abroad.
And many are just good engineers who are excited about self-driving cars, kind of like me not very long ago.
Thank you to everyone!
Dhruv has spent all of his waking hours this past week going through each application and organizing students into cohorts.
Udacity’s mission is to democratize education, so we will be trying to teach as many people as possible.
We’ll start small, with an initial cohort of 500 students, to give us a chance to scale up the program and iron out any wrinkles.
But we plan to be teaching thousands of students about self-driving cars by the end of the year.
See you in class!
(By the way, if you’re interested but haven’t applied yet, you can still do that! We’re taking applications now for our 2017 cohorts, so please apply!)
David Silver 