STUDENT STORY FINALISTS

Being a beginner I never in my wildest dreams thought I would get selected especially being an 58 year old man. I always thought coding was for younger phonemes with brilliant IQ's, but thought I only could get rejected so what's the lost? When I received the Email I was so excited I leaped up high in the air with jubilation!

This course has been everything and more than I had ever anticipated, the community is so friendly and willing to help. I am confident now that I can build my website and design it anyway I want! I am so grateful for this experience and will do anything to help anyone needing assistance because without GWGS I would not have the knowledge I do now!"

I currently work as a manager at a construction company, and support my daughter while she follows her passion in becoming a Veterinarian. I spend most of my days operating heavy equipment, driving dump trucks and building anything someone may need. I guess you could call me a "Jack of all trades". Coming home worn out has forced me to work at this challenge in the early morning hours and I am grateful for the way it has helped me to restructure my life in the pursuit of my dreams. I learned to type just for this course! I was also a very shy and introverted person before this challenge, and through helping and sharing on the discussion boards, I have started to overcome myself and be a little more outgoing publicly. I have already gotten so much more than I expected from this course. I am very grateful for being here. Thank You All!

For years, I worked in the political sector, but a couple of years ago, I started feeling it wear and tear on me and the person I wanted to be. Last year, my wife and I relocated for family reasons, and I saw it as an opportunity to make a clean break from that career field and to get a fresh start. We also became foster parents with hopes of eventual adoption, and I realized that whatever I did with my now-undecided career, I wanted it to be something positive that would help people or society in some way...I've learned to program before (even self-taught myself a lot of HTML and some CSS) and enjoyed it tremendously. It's [the Scholarship Challenge] also helped me by presenting me with a couple of potential opportunities for freelance work, and giving me options to change positions at my current employer--as well as by showing my foster kids different avenues for things they may want to learn themselves, and giving us a way to connect by designing little things for them on our computer.

I am well-aware that many people got the scholarship, and I know between classes, my wife and kids, and the Udacity course, I haven’t been one of the most active on Slack and I tend to do snippets of my work at random times throughout the week - I am also not one of the amazing seasoned pros, like some of my coursemates, but thank goodness for them because they've been a huge blessing of sorts with helping folks like me craving the AHA! moments as we learn. This course has boosted my confidence... I could never find my place in the world for many reasons - lesbian in rural America, skeptic in the pews of my childhood church, being raised by my grandparents with trips to my dads to see my mom (step mom, but she definitely earned the title MOM) and siblings, being a diehard Harry Potter fan and science nerd, in the Army under Dont Ask Dont Tell, and now as an LGBT Air Force wife - all of these things culminated into me never feeling like I quite fit anywhere. The tech community has given me my corner of the world and I've always doubted my ability to learn and fit in. This course has allowed me to show myself that I CAN do this and I DO fit in. Not only that, but I am STOKED to learn and grow and hopefully add the Nanodegree to my resume!

After another long 8 hour shift of scanning groceries, convincing myself not to quit my job before I finally get to clock out and start the commute home, I check my email inbox while kicking my work boots off and find a message from Udacity and Google. Instantly my heart lightens: a way out from the drudgery of being underemployed despite being surrounded by thriving tech companies, and a window into having a gainful full-time career making meaningful work and spending my day engaging in something challenging that fills me with passion. Since starting the program, I have had several interviews for developer positions with criteria I never would have been qualified for six months ago. While I haven't gotten any offers yet, the community and support of the program give me determination to send out more applications, continue to tweak my portfolio and hopefully land that dream job soon.

My first web development experience was in 1998 with the United States Navy. Our command website needed an update to comply with accessibility standards... No one else wanted that particular collateral duty. At the time I was just engaged in nerdy fun—but that experience altered my course. After the Navy, my wife supported me while I learned to be a civilian and pursued a CS degree. Later on I went to work for a small family-owned business writing software for county and city governments. Now I’m working in IT at a county in Oregon.

The Udacity scholarship through Grow with Google presented a way to expand my skills and reach for more without sacrificing too much family time or exhausting our resources. This experience has been a genuine challenge: balancing family, full-time work, coursework and community engagement isn't easy, but it has been well worth doing... We are a diverse group of people from all over the world, of varied experience, in completely different phases of our lives (both private and professional), working together, joining one another on the journey. Our field has good to offer the world, and I am proud to be a part of doing that in community.

Back in 2014 I was a customer service representative, barely making enough money to support my wife and myself. When we became pregnant I knew I needed to find a better way to provide for my family, but I also wanted a career that would make my unborn daughter proud. When Udacity emailed me about the Grow with Google opportunity, I knew it was a dream come true.

The Grow with Google Scholarship Challenge has directly helped me at my job, where I was recently promoted to software developer. As business analyst, I had made the case that we desperately needed to improve usability of our website for mobile users over the summer. One of my first tasks as a software developer was to optimize site load speed. Leaning on the concepts presented in this course (as well as Udacity's Website Performance Optimization), I increased the mobile conversion rate by 22%. The corresponding increase in web revenue paid for my entire year's salary in less than two weeks. I'm more focused than ever on growing to my full potential, and I am forever in Udacity and Google's debt for helping me stand tall in my daughter's eyes.

My young son inspired me to study computer programming because he started learning it before me, when he was only 6 years old, programming Lego NXT Robots. I wanted to know what he was talking about! I'm a former English major making a career change and looking for my first job in tech so that I can use my creative talents to create something useful and to be able to expand my opportunities to support my family and work remotely. I graduated from Udacity's Full Stack Nanodegree last fall and wanted to continue to develop my skills as a web developer.

I've made so many wonderful friends and study buddies despite being an introvert! I am amazed at how the Scholarship Challenge has helped in my life in that it has inspired me with new ideas (I love exploring Slack channels) and exposed me to enthusiastic, diverse, ambitious, and supportive classmates...I am also inspired by how everyone makes time to study and chat despite having such busy lives!

The circumstances that brought me to Udacity was a long time desire to learn app development and a renewed motivation to be able to teach what I learn to children. Fast forward a few years and I find myself the lead instructor and curriculum creator for a computer science nonprofit that teaches elementary to high school students how to code and "think like a programmer". I always have parents and students asking if we teach app development. Those questions sparked the desire in me (again) to learn to develop apps.

The Scholarship Challenge has so far helped me in two ways. In the web development part of my life it has opened up a new world with the introduction of a new programming language. More importantly, with every lesson I complete I am forming, in my mind, the lesson plans and curriculum that I can create to teach some of the basics of Android app development to elementary, middle, and high school students.

I am a high school teacher who fell into teaching computer science. During my first year of teaching I discovered a passion for computer science during Code.org’s “The Hour of Code” in December. The next year the school asked me to teach computer science full-time. This was a huge undertaking for me and I had no idea how to even begin preparing lessons and materials to teach with. So I spent a good portion of the summer exploring all the available online resources that were free to see if I could learn what I needed to learn to keep teaching! Fast forward four years and I discovered the Udacity Grow with Google Scholarship challenge. I applied to this program in particular for two reasons: It has been a dream of mine to become a full-time programmer and learning how to create apps is in line with that goal. Secondly, I am teaching a mobile application development class to high school students this year and I really didn’t have the background necessary to teach it well! Already this program has helped me help my students and community members (I create an app for a local pizza shop!)... and have even been encouraging my high school students to keep their eyes open for this very same opportunity in the future. Thanks Udacity and Google for this awesome opportunity!

My son Neil Jay is a senior android programmer and has wanted me to join him in programming for some time. He told me of the Scholarship program and I applied. Now a little background - in a few days I will turn 64. I have been working in programming on computers since the days of Basic and FORTRAN. I started building computers with the first personal computer IBM XT's. I have programmed websites, but that was with WYSIWYG programs. But at 64 years old find myself as one of the forgotten or cast off members of our society. Even though I have an A.A , B.S. and M.S degrees in my field and over 40 years experience, no one will hire me. So I decided to reinvent myself with Android Mobile programming.

So far the best thing that this scholarship challenge has helped with was a great new relationship with my son, who as I call him now, Yoda! He has helped me in so many ways, but mostly to encouraged me to keep on keeping on. My greatest hope for this Scholarship challenge is to excel to the point that I can get another scholarship to continue my education and eventually find a job to support my wife and I as a mobile Android programmer. At my age regretfully I cannot afford additional classes, but hold high hopes to continue on, and become again a meaningful and contributing member of our society. Thanks again for the chance, it has made a big difference in my life.

I am an Army veteran the proudly served as a Combat Engineer with a Speciality as a Heavy Construction Equipment Operator. During my time in service reclassed into a Bridge Crewmember position and finished my time in as a Human Administrative Specialist. Once my term ended I made the decision to stay at home with my children, which turned into the past 13 years. The desire to do more for my family is what brought me here. I want to take some of the burden off my husband. I want to be able to show my daughters that you can accomplish anything if you are willing to put forth the effort, hardwork and determination.

I want to learn how to create apps that will better our future, that will help our up and coming generations. In the words of my ten year old " Can you start with something on K-Prep testing?" . Those words push me even more each moment, wanting to come up with something that will help younger generations. We are the ones that will be creating what will enable future generations to better themselves. This scholarship makes me want to succeed even more, I want to accomplish this goal.

I completed 9 years of active duty with the US Marines in October 2017, and began working as Director of HR and Data Analysis for a small construction company. I took the position as a way to begin a transition into the civilian workforce and move my family to our location of choice. I knew that it would be an interesting challenge and also that it would give me a chance to sort out what I really wanted to pursue after spending so long focusing on my military career. I loved the Marine Corps (I continue to serve in the reserves) but with 3 kids and a fourth on the way, I needed to find a way to be available to them more consistently. I missed the acceptance email by overlooking it in my inbox! A little behind on the timeline and slowly realizing that I had greatly overestimated my Java and XML abilities, I decided to work through some of the other Udacity courses available and then come back to the course. It paid off. Although the learning curve is still steep at times, I can feel my fluency improving every exercise.

I need every remaining moment to complete the course, but I am looking forward to creating original and professional apps soon. More importantly, whether I make it to phase 2 or not, I have learned the skills necessary to make that dream a reality. Now, the sky is the limit!

When I left the high school classroom after 15+ years to try something new, things didn't exactly work out as planned, and I wound up being significantly underemployed for three years. Two things happened around the same time that changed that -- The first was an email that went out to those of us that had taken the Android session of our TechHire program -- a company in town was looking for part-time temporary Teaching Assistants for a new pilot program wherein underserved high school seniors would receive intensive app development skills for four hours a day for a semester... Without having gotten the TA position, I would not have had the reason to try for the Udacity scholarship; without the Udacity scholarship, I would not have felt qualified for the TA position.

Words cannot describe the difference since having received these two simultaneous opportunities. My confidence, my skills, my sense of value and worth have skyrocketed through this program. While I know (intellectually) that I would have been able to help these students before, after being involved in this challenge course, I FEEL capable of doing it. From this community, I feel excited, empowered, and energized

In the year 2015, I was a fresh refugee immigrant from Nepal to the United States with a physics bachelor’s degree on my hand. I came here to get better life and to continue my education and to fulfill my ambitions. My first years in the US, I went to the several universities to continue my further study and made a conclusion that I would never be able to get my master’s degree from Universities because of financial problem. Though, I never got frustrated. When I got here I got my first laptop and smart phone from my first 2 months’ paycheck. I started self-learning from Edx, Code academy etc. It was really cool and impressed me deeply. I decided to start my rest of career in computer science.

January 2017, she [my case worker] emailed me that Techhire Pittsburgh was giving a free full stack boot camp class to 20 applicants. Fortunately, I got selected and it was the first code class I have ever taken. With a limited skill we finally created the [android] app. This was the turning point for me. Again, my case worker sends me the link and I got really excited because this time it was google challenge scholarship which I wanted, and I can’t wait to be signed up. This Scholarship Challenge helped me to be confident, eagerness in challenge and problem-solving skills. At the end of the course, I have my own android app and would be applying for several jobs.

After 20 years of taking on dull project management and customer support jobs, I feel unchallenged, stagnant and in desperate need for a change. I decided that, from now on, I want to invest my time working on projects that energize me so I can learn and excel at them. Learning C, Python and Java (and now Android) have been such a constant source of enjoyment for me that I have not considered programming to be a “real” job, but a hobby. I fully enjoy all aspects of software development, including learning new languages, tools and techniques, research, troubleshooting, testing, and documenting. When I'm engaged in these activities, I become so focused that I lose track of time. I have finally realized that I will be able to earn a good living doing something I love.

I lost my job a couple of months ago due to an acquisition, but except for the temporary economic impact, this unexpected free time has given me additional time to focus on learning. And, besides the new things I am learning, this scholarship is providing me a daily dose of joy and friendships. The only downside of this course is that, because it has been so absorbing, it has also distracted me from looking for a job! This scholarship has also provided me the absolute confidence that I’ll be able to become a professional mobile developer in the very near future.

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