Announcing 60,000 Challenge Scholarships from Udacity and Google

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Announcing 60,000 Challenge Scholarships from Udacity and Google

By Stuart Frye
September 5, 2017

Udacity and Google share a commitment to increasing learning opportunities for deserving students across the globe, and this mission has been the cornerstone of our partnership from the start. Most recently, together with Bertelsmann, we launched an ambitious scholarship initiative across Europe for aspiring Android developers. As a result, thousands of students earned the opportunity to master job-ready skills.
The results not only warmed our hearts, but inspired us to significantly expand our efforts.
Scholarship recipient George Szabo begins a blog post entitled How Udacity Changed my Life at 30 with these lines:

“3 months ago a beautiful journey started for me. I was selected for a scholarship program, the Android Beginners path offered by Udacity and Google, which truly changed my life. This is a short story of turning your life in a new direction. A story about landing a new job in two months. A story about learning. A story about changing one’s life.”

Tam Love, also a scholarship recipient, wrote two posts chronicling her experience; this is her conclusion to the second one:

“From Udacity and Google, I have learned more than just technical skills; I have learned to believe in myself, and achieve things I never thought were possible. I wrote previously that they changed my life — this is even more true today than it was before.”

Today, Udacity and Google are very excited to announce the creation of 60,000 new Challenge Scholarships.
These Challenge Scholarships will be awarded to students across Europe, and in Russia, Egypt, Israel and Turkey. 6000 of these recipients will subsequently receive full Nanodegree program scholarships. For more details, and to apply, please visit the program’s landing page here.
Motivated by the incredible success of our first scholarship offering, we are not only increasing the number of opportunities on offer, we are also significantly widening the geographic reach of our efforts. We want to empower a global community of aspiring learners to acquire valuable skills, to establish rewarding careers, and to live life to its full potential.
We’re also expanding beyond Android, to include web development content, for both beginners, and more advanced programmers. All recipients will earn access to world-class curriculum, dynamic peer communities, and personalized mentorship.
The scholarship program is structured in two phases:

Phase 1: 60,000 Challenge Scholarships

The first phase of this scholarship provides three months of access to one of four Udacity courses: Intro to HTML + CSS, Offline Web Applications, Android Basics, and Developing Android Apps. Scholarship recipients in these courses will receive a robust community experience supported by Udacity mentors and dedicated Community Managers; they will also have a chance to qualify for a full Nanodegree scholarship.

Phase 2: 6,000 Nanodegree Scholarships

The top 6,000 students in the program earn an additional 6-month scholarship to one of four Nanodegree programs: Front-End Web Developer, Mobile Web Specialist, Android Basics, and Android Developer. The full-scholarships will include project reviews, mentorship, and community support.

Stories like the ones mentioned above are what these scholarships are all about. In the video below, Ildikó Fekete shares her story. She describes her transformation into what she smilingly refers to as a “Coding Mum,” and shares how the scholarship enabled her to learn new skills, express her creativity, and create something “that really matters, and can impact other’s lives.” As a result of what she learned, she was able to build a new Android app called GreenFeet, which can calculate carbon footprints, and help protect the environment.