Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Scholarship

August 19, 2020

@channel Happy Wednesday, scholars! This week is zooming by so fast For those of you who feel the same way, I hope you’re taking breaks here and there to keep yourself sane! Now onto a special announcement…

Technical AMA with @Donna.L Friday, August 21st!

Donna currently works as a lead at a fast paced, IT Managed Services command center! She manages a ton of different technologies (including Nutanix hyperV) to keep customers’ infrastructure and equipment running. On top of that, she’s a student leader for #women_in_cloud!

She made a major shift into tech after Udacity’s Grow with Google Front End Web Developer Scholarship. Before the scholarship, she was working as a band teacher and a certified arborist For those of you who are looking to leverage your scholarship to spark a career shift, this is a valuable AMA to attend!

Here’s @Donna.L in her own words:

Hi all! My technical background is actually quite brief. In early 2018 I was accepted into the Grow with Google/Udacity FEND scholarship program as well as a scholarship through the State of Illinois to learn Cisco networking. I essentially double majored for several months. After earning my nanodegree, I was recruited to work in an IT Managed Services command center. It is very fast paced, and we manage a metric slew of different technologies (including Nutanix hyperV) to keep customers’ infrastructure and equipment running. About 6 months ago, I was asked to be the Shift Lead for my team, and now am in charge of keeping the triage and shift running smoothly and liaise between the different technology teams.

My past life was quite different - I majored in Music Education and taught Elementary Band for 4 years, and worked Public Works during the summers on the tree removal crew. Then I slid into Public Works full time as a Certified Arborist, for a couple of different Chicago area municipalities. The thing I found really interesting about going back and diving into technical training, it that the more I studied FEND and did coding, I would get old musical etudes from college running through my head non-stop... I guess the synapses used for programming are the same for learning to play music!

Please join Donna in our second Technical AMA this Friday, August 21st 10AM PDT I 5PM GMT I 10:30PM IST in the #ama_sessions channel! The event has been added to our program calendar as well.

If you want to host a Technical (or Career) AMA, please fill out this form.

See you all there!

August 18, 2020

@channel ALL ABOARD THE STUDY TRAM JAM!

Many of you have been waiting for a Study Jam, and I’m so thrilled to come to you with further details! Much like trams, Study Jams serve the purpose of taking you from point A, your current place in the Foundations course, to point B, 100% course completion!

SAVE THE DATE!

The Study Tram Jam will take place on August 22nd 8am PDT to August 23rd 8am PDT. Get ready for 24 hours of learning, studying, and hanging out with your fellow classmates!

Study Jams are a magical time in the community and have been sited by students time and time again, as the most memorable and helpful event of the scholarship challenge! This is something you don’t want to miss

Even if you have already completed your Foundations course, there will be a ton of technical and non-technical activities that you can partake in!

Check out the updated Study Jam page on our Google site for a schedule of technical webinars as well as more details on how the Study Tram Jam will work!

A HUGE shout out to everyone who had a part in organizing This couldn’t have happened without all of you!

With that, I’ll leave you with a beautiful poster @Amardeep Singh created for the Study Jam

August 14, 2020

@channel Hi scholars! What an eventful technical AMA session with @Sean Brown we had earlier today! I could tell that you all were hungry for a technical session by the excitement you showed Sean. I highly recommend that you read through the session on #ama_sessions if you missed it, and get excited for future AMAs to come!

Since it’s a Friday, I thought it would be timely to dish out a fun fact about the scholarship! Did you know that the three most represented countries in this scholarship are India, United States, and Brazil?

Onto some quick reminders…

The volunteer form for the upcoming Study Jam closes on August 16th at Midnight GMT! If you want to help moderate Slack, create events, or host technical webinars, sigh up here!

#weekly_quiz is going through the Foundations material over again! Test your knowledge by joining in on the second cycle of weekly quizzes for each lesson, this is especially perfect for those who are just beginning the scholarship program. This week’s quiz centers Lesson 2: Journey to the Modern Hybrid Cloud!

Attend #sg_latm meeting over the weekend! The group has been actively holding meetings and feature some great discussion. This week’s meeting will cover Data Protection and Containers! Check out this post by @Jorge Barrera for more details.

Looking for tips on how to learn most efficiently? Check out this interesting read @Mary Becken posted! Who knew doing nothing does so much to stimulate your brain?

That’s it for now, have a great weekend everyone! I’ll catch y’all on Monday

August 13, 2020

@channel Happy Thursday, scholars! Coming to you with a weekly completion stats update:

We are currently at a 12% completion rate! If we keep going at this rate, we’ll likely exceed the average completion rate for all scholarships in Phase 1, which is 25%. Let’s keep up with this momentum and blow all the cohorts before us out of the water; we got this!

We only need 48 completions to push us over to 13%. There are 89 of you who are just under completing the course, I challenge those of you to spend an hour or two this coming weekend to complete the course

Onto some quick reminders!

Midpoint survey closes tomorrow at 12PM PDT! Make sure to fill it out if you haven’t already, we use your feedback to shape the latter half of the scholarship and future scholarship cohorts.

We’re having a technical AMA tomorrow (August 14th) with @Sean Brown in #ama_sessions at 9am PDT, Sean will be in the channel to answer any questions related to Cloud and his technical background. Check out the announcement from yesterday to read Sean’s bio!

August 12, 2020

@channel SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT!

Introducing Technical AMAs!

There’s a lot of folks in our community who are established leaders in their field and those who have changed their careers completely due to a Udacity scholarship! I know these are the students you want to hear from With the extra time we have left, I wanted to give these scholars a platform where they can have a dedicated AMA session and share their expertise and experiences!

Kicking off our first Technical AMA session is @Sean Brown! Sean is a Database Engineer at an International Law Firm in Washington, D.C and you may have seen him around giving his expert advice on various Cloud offerings in the community

Here’s Sean in his own words:

Our firm is laying the groundwork to be 1) Cloud ready and 2) Hybrid Cloud enabled. I work closely on the Front-End Apps we use for collaboration internally and also with clients. I also work extensively with the backend databases all of this data must live in. As our on-premise applications near replacement, I evaluate where is the best place and platform for replacement. This could be SaaS, PaaS, IaaS or Hybrid. This allows me to explore the cloud offerings and capabilities with the flexibility of choosing a solution that best fits the business requirements.

Other than that, I am a true geek at heart so most of my hobbies evolve around something to do with technology . I do however love the stock market and watching companies/industries evolve. I also enjoy documentaries, history, wildlife, and oddly enough boxing of all sports.

Please join Sean in our first Technical AMA this Friday, August 14th 9AM PDT I 4PM GMT I 9:30PM IST in the #ama_sessions channel! The event has been added to our program calendar as well.

If you want to host a Technical (or Career) AMA, please fill out this form

I hope to see many of you in our first Technical AMA of the scholarship!

August 11, 2020

@channel Hi everyone! For those of you who are looking for an easier way to double check that you completed all the quizzes and exercises in the foundation course, @Jonathan Blanco pulled through to give us an extremely valuable resource!

Here’s the Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Checklist! Jonathan compiled all the quizzes in the Foundations course along with the links to each quiz and reflection. Use this checklist to keep track of all the exercises you need to complete!

You can make a copy (File >Make a copy) of the checklist so you can edit it as you please

Thank you so much @Jonathan Blanco!

August 10, 2020

@channel Welcome back to another Monday! I hope many of you were able to use the weekend to recharge and refuel! Looking back to the previous announcement, it looks like many of you want a weekly completion status update! I’ll start to roll those out on a weekly basis I have a handful of announcements so buckle up!

Midpoint Survey closes August 14th at 12PM PDT

This week’s your last chance to submit your feedback about the scholarship via the Midpoint Survey! Your feedback is really important as we use it to shape the scholarship experience for the latter half and for future scholarship cohorts!

Fill out the survey here!

Study Jam Volunteer Sign-ups close August 16th at 12PM PDT

The core team is steadily organizing the agenda for our upcoming Study Jam on August 22nd! If you’re interested in volunteering for the Study Jam (hosting a webinar, moderating Slack, creating events), you have until Sunday to sign up. Study Jam is a time when the Slack workspace is the most active (aside from the first week), so make sure to get in on the action!

Study Jam Volunteer form here!

Finished with your Foundations course and aiming for a Nutanix Certification?

#nutanix_certification holds focused weekly study plans to help prepare you to take the Nutanix Certification exam by the end of Phase 1! Hop into the channel and take part in the Week 2 study guide!

Study Group spotlight: #sg_spaic

#sg_spaic is one of the most active Study Groups in our community! These students have built a long-lasting bond that started in the Facebook Secure and Private AI scholarship! With organized meetings, newsletters, and fun posts, there’s always something going on in this channel

For those of you who miss being in the office, please check out the link @DSdatsme shared! It’s great background noise to have on, I’m currently listening to it now https://soundofcolleagues.com/

Need some brain fuel?

@Prachal Patel wrote a very well thought out and easy-to-follow post on how Cloud Scaling works Give it a read here and give some major props to Prachal for explaining the concept in digestible chunks!

Happy learning, everyone I’ll see y’all around!

August 7, 2020

@channel Happy Friday, scholars! We’ve made it through another week Since I last posted the announcement of our stats, we’ve been bumped up to a completion rate of 11% To move this much in a span of 1 day is quite impressive!

If you want weekly status updates about completions, let me know by hitting the emoji on this announcement!

Now onto other happenings in the community

Weekend quizzes in #weekly_quiz!

@Kapil C and @Shivani have created timed-quizzes to offer you all a game-like learning experience, complete with a leaderboard! A new quiz is released every Friday based on a particular lesson. The solutions, leaderboard (with ranks, badges, and scores), and explanations are posted after the deadline, Monday 11:30 AM GMT. The quiz is released on Friday and is hosted as a live game till Monday.

Leaderboard, old quizzes and flashcards: http://bit.do/nhcsc-wqq-leaderboard

Cloud Expert of the Week Challenge in #l1_modernhybridcloud

@Laxmi Sravya Rudraraju and @Mokit Hossain have an ongoing challenge where they ask a few questions every week to crown a student as Cloud Expert of the Week! If you’re looking for a more interactive way to learn, this is a perfect challenge to join!

The challenge goes LIVE every Saturday(8-8:30 AM PDT) for 4 days until Wednesday(8-8:30AM PDT). Congrats to Cloud experts of the week @Raj Pathare and @Gurpreet singh!

In the midst of a career change and looking for inspiration?

Check out @Vincent Battaglia’s inspiring post on how he made a career shift from account management to developer! It’s a truly impressive story and reading it made me feel empowered to commit to invest in my personal development, no matter how busy I am.

Read Vincent’s post here!

That’s all I have for now! Keep doing what you’re doing, I’m proud of the progress you’ve all been making Onwards and upwards!

August 5, 2020

@channel It’s another wonderful Wednesday! I know some of you may benefit from some extra motivation, so I’m here to share some numbers and insights and hopefully, it’ll give you an extra boost to be on track to complete your Foundations course!

Our current numbers

We’re currently at 495 completions! This translates to a 10% completion rate. We have roughly 8 weeks left to Phase 1, so we still have time to get this rate up! Historically speaking, Phase 1 ends with an average of a 25% completion rate. I think we can up the ante and aim for a 40% completion rate! This is the first time we’ve held a scholarship with Nutanix. I’d love for us set the bar high so there can be more opportunities to come in the future

There are around 100 of you who are just shy of graduating! I hope this news motivates you to finish the few lessons you have left

Now onto events in the community!

Finished #30days_udacity?

Congratulations on this tremendous feat! Fill out the form below to show that you’ve completed the challenge! Once you do, you’ll see a star next to your name on our Honorable Mentions Pledge Wall to signify that you’ve finished the challenge. If you’re up for it, I challenge you to keep your streak Let’s see if someone can reach Day 60!

Form for completing 30 Days of Udacity

Honorable Mentions Wall

Workspace picture challenge in #introductions

@susyjam and @Yash Mathur have worked together to create a fun challenge in #introductions! Now that many of us are working from home, it’s the perfect time to show off our “home office!” Feel free to post your pictures in the channel with the tag #workspacepicturechallenge, I’m curious to see everyone’s workspaces!

Channel spotlight: #nutanix_certification

@RobG @Hernan Scavetta (Nutanix NTC) @Simon Buchanan (NutanixNTC) have created a channel for students who want to prepare for the Nutanix Certification Exam! They are using the Nutanix Exam Blueprint and the Nutanix Bible to create focused weekly studies. If you’ve finished the course and are interested in taking the certification exam, this is a great way to study AND to stay involved in the community!

That’s it for now! I’ll see you around in Slack

August 3, 2020

@channel Happy Monday everyone! Just a little fun fact, did you know Monday gets its name from the Anglo-Saxon word “mondandaeg” which translates to the moon’s day? Anyways, I hope everyone was able to refuel over the weekend; enough to be ready to tackle a new week!

We’re extending Student Stories!

I’ve sent a sample of stories to the larger team and they were so well received that I’m extending the deadline to September 7th to account for more stories! When the deadline comes around, we’ll pick the top 10 most inspiring stories and have the community vote on which story moved them most. The most moving story will receive a feature on Udacity’s social media handles!

I’ll be featuring stories each week from students who’ve already submitted! This week’s feature goes to @Tali!

Here’s an excerpt of Tali’s story in her own words:

About five years ago, when I was looking for courses in Cryptography, I found a very informative MOOC on Applied Cryptography on Udacity. Shortly after that, I became a Technical Writer in a custom cryptography development company. The learning curve there was so steep that I was learning new things 100% of the time while working there. Unfortunately, the recent pandemics has set me free. I’ve decided to treat this time-out as a personal gift and follow the path of future butterflies that spend some time in self-isolation in a cocoon, turning from crawling things into marvellous flying creatures. I decided to refer to these months as “My COVID19 University”.

Read more of Tali’s story on our Google site!

Submit your own stories here!

SAVE THE DATE: Study Jam on August 22nd at 8AM PDT!

The upcoming Study Jam has been set to take place on August 22nd 8AM PDT to to August 23rd 11:59PM PDT! Check out the flyer below The core organizing team is still creating the agenda, but if you have an idea for an event for Study Jam or would like to volunteer to help, please fill out our Volunteer Sign-up form!

#30days_udacity form open!

For those of you who weren’t able to sign up for #30days_udacity in time, now’s your lucky chance! Since the scholarship has been extended, the form is now open again for you to sign up for the challenge. Please make sure to submit the pledge by or before August 30th, which is the last possible day to sign up!

30 Days of Udacity pledge form here!

Details about the 30 Days of Udacity challenge here!

Whew, that was a lot! That’s all for announcements today, I’ll catch y’all later!