Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Scholarship

July 31, 2020

@channel Happy Friday everyone! I’m here to announce the winner of the Visual Challenge…. Congratulations @Rahulraj Singh!!!

Rahulraj’s wonderful visual piece seen below has won the votes of many, crowning him as winner! I want to give an honorable mention to @Sabyh @Yatharth Singh @Jasbir, all of your entries were very close runner-ups

I asked Rahulraj what his favorite part of the challenge was and here’s what he had to say:

“I have always been a visual learner. All the text information never really gets into my head. My favorite part of the challenge was the existence of the challenge itself, because I could relate to it on a very personal level. I have made infographics of every lesson and almost every concept. Having said that, there is no challenge in the entire course of this scholarship that can be complete without the awesome community that we have. I cannot really express it in words how glad I am to be part of this group, but the vivid participation from everyone and seeing all the drawings and visuals that everyone made, won my heart! I studied every visual very carefully, because creativity is not something we can learn from books. It’s from all these experiences and other’s thoughts that we learn artistic ways of thinking.”

Read more about his background and approach to the Visual Challenge in his feature on our Google Site!

July 29, 2020

@channel Happy Wednesday Scholars! I’m here to deliver some long-awaited news Here’s what you’ve all been waiting for…introducing STUDY JAM!!!

Study Jam is one of our BIGGEST Community events!

Remember the all nighters you used to pull with your friends before a big test? This is exactly what this event recreates! Study Jams are marathon study sessions where everyone is online at the same time to work on the Foundations course, together. The Study Jam can run anywhere from 12-48 hours! This is the only time in the Scholarship program where you can get live technical help, AMAs, and quizzes around the clock!

Historically speaking, Study Jams have been a mix of mostly technical events (webinars, walkthroughs, and AMAs) with some fun events, like meme challenges , and non-technical webinars sprinkled in. There’s something for everyone!

To create an event at this large of a scale, we need the help of the community! If you want to:

• host a technical or non-technical webinar

• share an idea for a fun challenge

• offer your technical expertise through Slack

Please fill out the volunteer sign up form here!

While we finalize the date and time of Study Jam, read up on the details of the program on our Google Site!

Happy learning, everyone!

July 27, 2020

@channel Important Announcement!!

Happy Monday, scholars! I hope everyone was able to unplug during the weekend I’m coming to you with some important news:

Deadline extended until September 30th 11:59PM PDT

The deadline for this scholarship program has been extended to September 30th, 2020 11:59 PM PDT! Since the team is still building out the content for Phase 2, it was decided that it will be best to extend Phase 1 and give folks who may be short on time a chance to complete the course.

I hope this inspires those of you who just started the scholarship to really get involved in the course and the community!

Midpoint Survey: Your feedback counts!

We’re still collecting responses for our Midpoint survey! This is very important as it’s an opportunity to directly hear from you about how you’re enjoying the scholarship so far Your feedback helps us gain an understanding of what’s working and what’s not working and as a bonus, it will help us shape our community programming for future scholarships to come!

Please look over it when you have the chance! We currently have over 100 responses, we’d love to hear from more of you

Midpoint survey here

That’s it for now! See you all soon

July 24, 2020

@channel Happy Friday everyone!! Before we conclude the week, I wanted a quick announcement!

Visual Challenge ends on July 29th!

I’ll be tallying the emoji votes for all the Visual Challenge entries on July 29th, so please make sure to post your entries before then! The winner will be announced July 30th and will be spotlighted on our Google Site

I won’t be deleting the channel, so you can still upload more visual works after the date but it won’t be counted towards our challenge. #visual_challenge_gallery is full of great resources; make sure to take advantage of this even if you did not participate in the challenge! We have tons of scholars who are able to break down abstract concepts into easy-to-digest chunks

On another note, thank you to all of those who joined in on the Nutanix Technical Webinar this morning! There were so many great questions that were asked. We’re still waiting on the recording, but once we receive it, we’ll announce it and post in on the Google site. Thanks for your patience!

Enjoy your weekend everyone! Take some time to soak in the sun

July 23, 2020

@channel Hello scholars! The week really whizzed by, didn’t it? I hope you were able to learn something new this week! I learned today that cats have an organ called the Jacobson’s organ that allows them to taste the air they smell Anyways, I wanted to swing by and make some quick announcements!

Exclusive technical webinar with Nutanix TOMORROW! July 24th 8:30AM PDT I 4PM GMT I 9PM IST

Nutanix’s Senior Software Engineer Sion Beard will go over concepts covered in the Foundations course! We’ll be conducting a 15-minute live Q&A session at the end. This is a valuable session, so please try to attend! If you can’t make it, the session will be recorded

What? Technical Webinar w/ Nutanix Senior Software Engineer

When? Friday, July 24th 8:30AM PDT I 4PM GMT I 9PM IST

How? Attend via this Zoom link!

Channel Spotlight: #sg_reading_club

Want a group of scholars to discuss relevant articles and book related to Cloud? Look no fruther, #sg_reading_club is here! @Abhik Banerjee made this group with the intention of connecting with other students who were interested in reading and discussing the latest Cloud happenings. Come join!

As always, happy learning!

July 22, 2020 (pt. 2)

@channel Happy Wednesday, scholars! Coming at you with a few more announcements to close out the day!

Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Midpoint Survey

Can you believe that we’ve hit the exact midpoint of the scholarship program? It feels like it was just yesterday when I was welcoming you all into the Slack community This is the perfect time to roll out the Midpoint Survey

This survey is for the Udacity Community Team to gauge your experience in the scholarship program so far. We want to hear directly from you; your feedback matters! We’ll take the survey into account as we gear up for the second half of the scholarship program and for future scholarships

Fill out the Midpoint survey here!

30 Days of Udacity deadline to sign up TODAY!

I’ve told you before that July 21st is the last day to sign up for the challenge to ensure you had enough time to complete the challenge for 30 day before the scholarship deadline. I noticed that some people joined the challenge earlier today!

I’m here to tell you that today is really the last possible day to sign up for the challenge. I’ll be turning off the form at 11:59 PM PDT today.

Sign up for the challenge here.

If you’ve already been participating in the challenge but forgot to sign up and see that the sign up form is closed, please send me a DM!

July 22, 2020 (pt. 1)

@channel SPECIAL EVENT THIS FRIDAY!

@JohnBucMoore has helped us secure an exclusive technical webinar with Nutanix! On Friday, July 24th 8:30AM PDT I 4PM GMT I 9PM IST Nutanix’s Senior Software Engineer Sion Beard will go over concepts covered in the Foundations course! We’ll be conducting a 15-minute live Q&A session at the end. This is a valuable session, so please try to attend!

What? Technical Webinar w/ Nutanix Senior Software Engineer

When? Friday, July 24th 8:30AM PDT I 4PM GMT I 9PM IST

How? Attend via this Zoom link!

Our calendar and Google site has been updated accordingly to reflect this very special event!

If you see John floating around Slack, make sure to give him a big thank you!

July 21, 2020

@channel Today is the opening day of the #visual_challenge_gallery!!! I’m so excited to see what y’all have been cooking up for this gallery! I know without a doubt that this will be the most informative art gallery I’ve been to I’ll break down how this portion of the challenge works so you can get to posting!

To participate:

• Please join #visual_challenge_gallery

• Post your visual work(s); there’s no limit to how many pieces you can post!

• View other students’ works and leave feedback when you can!

• We have a emoji leaderboard system set up, so if you find a post that speaks to these categories, please react accordingly:

If you find a post…

informative, please use as an emoji reaction.

insightful, please use as an emoji reaction.

creative, please use as an emoji reaction.

beautiful, please use as an emoji reaction.

Further directions are in the announcement in #visual_challenge_gallery! I’ll see you all over there!

July 20, 2020

@channel Happy Monday y’all!! I hope you all were able to recharge over the weekend. I saw that the workspace was livelier than ever, so many posts and meetings! It makes my day seeing the way you use the scholarship to make new connections I have a couple of points to go over, so get ready!

Visual Challenge Gallery opens tomorrow, July 21st!

If you’ve been spending a lot of your time creating a visual for the challenge, tomorrow’s the day to start showing it off! I’ll be creating a Slack channel where you can post your work and the community can vote on it! The most voted piece will be posted on the Google site for everyone to see!

There’s been some confusion about the visual challenge, but the gist of the challenge is to create a visual piece of work, it could be a gif, illustration, comic, infographic, video, anything visual that explains any concept from the Foundations course! Find all the details here. There’s no such thing as a bad visual, I encourage everyone to post the work that they’ve spent time making!

Exclusive Webinar with Nutanix!!

@JohnBucMoore has been working endlessly with Nutanix to secure us a webinar exclusively for our scholars! The special webinar will take place this Friday, July 24th, at 8:30am PDT. To help us organize the webinar agenda please fill out this questionnaire which asks about your course progress, what topics you found difficult within each lesson, and allows you to enter all of your lesson specific questions! It’s really important that you fill this out so we can curate an agenda that will benefit all of you

Have a great rest of your day everyone! Don’t hesitate to reach out to your peers and I if you have any questions or concerns

July 11, 2020 (pt.2)

@channel

Introducing the Visual Challenge!!!

65% of the world are visual learners and quite a few people learn by doing, also called tactile learners! In this new challenge, we’ve accounted for both learning styles by challenging the community to create a piece of visual work that explains a concept covered in the Foundations course.

We’re accepting anything visual- infographics, comics, illustrations, charts, graphs, but no memes! These visual works should explain the concepts at hand; not poke fun of them!

Here are the guidelines of how the Challenge will work:

1. Start creating your visual work! Make sure it explains one of the concepts covered in the Foundations course. You have 1 full week to create this visual piece, starting now! This can count towards your entries in 30 Days of Udacity 🥳

2. We’ll open up a new Slack channel called #visual_challenge_gallery, next week on July 21st. You’ll be able to post your works to the channel when it’s created!

3. We’ll ask the community to vote on the entries via emoji reactions. We have a Scorebot App in Slack that we’ll be using to allocate points to certain emojis!

4. We’ll highlight the highest voted visual pieces on our Google site and in an announcement!

I wanted to call out that you absolutely DO NOT have to be a master painter, illustrator, or anything to participate in this challenge! This is all about using visual elements to explain an abstract concept. Sometimes the most humble infographics can be the most impactful

This is the first time we’ve launched this initiative, so I’m really excited to see where you all take this! I’m especially excited to be a patron for our own virtual art museum!

P.S. I’m curious to know what sorts of learners we have in the community! Share your answers here

July 11, 2020 (pt.1)

@channel Happy Tuesday, scholars!! We’re well into another week, I hope it’s been a productive one so far I’ve got a couple of updates to share with you, so without further ado…

Student Stories deadline extended to Thursday, July 16th 5PM PDT!

I’ve extended the deadline to accommodate more students to share their journey with us! Please make sure to submit the form before the updated deadline. I’ve updated the Calendar to reflect this new date

Are notes your study method of choice?

@AudreyST and @Vincent Battaglia have spent a lot of time crafting up Notion workspaces to host their library of notes for the course! I think this would be a tremendous help for many of you, please check it out and give them a thank you! These are both highly organized notes that I know must have taken a lot of time to create. Thank you so much for sharing your resources with the rest of the community!

@AudreyST’s notes

@Vincent Battaglia’s notes

We also have a #study_notes channel, feel free to join!

Technical office hours!

The Student Leaders of #tech_help,@Krishna Chari @RobG @Vincent Battaglia and @Chris M, have been working endlessly to bring you all a live technical office hour every Monday, Wednesday, and Sunday! Sundays will be over a Zoom call, so make sure you join in on the fun

Find more details in @Chris M’s post here!

That’s all I have for now, I’ll be back later to share all the details of the Visual Challenge later today!

July 10, 2020

@channel Happy Friday everyone!!!! I hope everyone will take a moment this weekend to unwind and relax I know I definitely will! Coming at you with some quick updates:

Student Stories

I wanted to let you all know that the Student Stories Challenge is still ongoing! We really want to know your story of how you came to Udacity. I know it’s a little early to see direct impacts from the course, but let us know if being in the community has had positive impacts or changed your life in any way, big or small!

Virtual Technology Bootcamp

@JohnBucMoore has graciously let me know that there’s a bootcamp featuring Nutanix this coming week! Please check out the details below:

Nutanix Senior Engineers are hosting a Virtual Technology Bootcamp this Tuesday, July 14th at 9:30 AM PT | 4:30 PM GMT | 10 PM IST

Our instructors will work with us to enhance our knowledge of Nutanix private cloud technology, including how to:

- Configure a cluster, manage storage, VMs, networks, and file storage with one-click simplicity of Prism.

- Configure, manage, and scale your infrastructure.

- Optimize and monitor your environment with additional enterprise-grade features.

Register as soon as possible, spots are limited. This will be a great experience to get hands-on with Nutanix HCI. So, study up and bring your questions!

I’ll see everyone on Monday! I wish you all a wonderful weekend!

July 9, 2020

@channel Happy Thursday everyone! Another week has flown by I hope you’ve been warmly welcoming all the Student Leaders in their respective channels Coming to you with a couple of highlights:

Missed our AMAs? Check our the AMA transcripts!

@Mhathesh and @Ahmed M. Hasan have graciously volunteered their time to compile transcripts from Monday’s and Wednesday’s AMA session! Please check it out on our Google Site for easy viewing!

Study Groups are ongoing!

Want to create a Study Group or join one? Check out the Study Group page and see what groups have formed. If you have an idea for a Study Group that doesn’t exist yet, use the form on the page to submit your group!

Channel Spotlight: #weekly_quiz

@Kapil C, @Shivani, @Eshwar Kamalapathy, and @shraddha have been working endlessly to bring you all a weekly quiz exercise! The team uses the quizzizz tool to conduct fun, interactive quizzes to test your knowledge on the course material. They even have a leaderboard for some friendly competition Please check out this week’s quiz! I’m super impressed at how organized the team is, thank you for creating such a helpful challenge!

What’s it like where you live?

@Mitchell Greifeneder created a fun challenge in #introductions during our first week, but it was lost in the sea of introductions! Check it out here Upload a picture of your area, I’d love to see how life is like in other parts of the world

That’s it for now, see you all tomorrow! Have a wonderful rest of your day

July 8, 2020

@channel This is a bit overdue, but…..Student Leaders have been announced!!

It was a really competitive applicant pool and it was quite difficult to narrow it down to the Student Leaders we have now. We received well over 250 applications! It’s amazing to see so many of you interested in stepping up to the plate to lead the rest of your peers

I’ve read numerous thoughtful applications and have been amazed at how eloquent and forward-thinking some of you are! I wanted to say that even if you did not get selected to be a Student Leader, you are still a very integral part of the community. You still have many opportunities to get involved and to even host webinars and launch challenges of your own!

Without further ado, please check out the roster of Student Leaders that will be leading you all throughout the duration of Phase 1! You’ll see them introducing themselves in their assigned channels, make sure to give them a warm welcome!

EDIT: The roster is now available to view for everyone, sorry about that mishap

July 7, 2020

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

Do you want to supercharge your coding skills? There is one surefire way to do it and that’s to study everyday. We’re excited to announce and invite you on this great endeavor through the #30DaysofUdacity challenge! Starting today, we will study for 30 days — Simply study for 30 minutes a day for 30 days and tell us how it went each day in the #30days_udacity channel. This challenge is just as much about acknowledging our own accomplishments as it is about supporting each other. Try to find two people each day and tell them what a great job they are doing!

You can start #30daysofUdacity anytime before July 21st, 2020, this will give you a full 30 days to complete the challenge prior to the actual final date of Phase 1 — August 21st, 2020. When you finish, your name will land on the Honorable Mentions Wall for the challenge! Click here for full challenge guidelines. Best of luck!

July 6, 2020

@channel CALLING FOR STUDENT STORIES!

Today is the launch of our Student Stories! This is our most inspiring challenge (and my personal favorite) where you can tell us your story of who you are and how you came to Udacity! I personally love reading through these; all of them are inspiring and motivating in their own way, and it’s so interesting to see what everyone wants to achieve with the skills they learn through each scholarship program.

We’ll be collecting stories through this form. We really believe each and every one of you has a unique story, so try to be personal and descriptive with your responses. Make sure it captures your journey and who you are as a person!

We’ll be collecting stories until Tuesday, July 14th. You have a little over a week left to get those in! The community team will pick the 10 most moving stories and present them to the workspace for votes. The most voted on story will receive a special prize!

Submit your story here

Deadline to submit: Tuesday, July 14th 5pm PDT

Excited to read through everyone’s entires, submit away!

July 1, 2020 (pt. 2)

@channel Hi everyone! Leaving you all with some quick reminders before the early weekend

Udacity is closed Thursday and Friday, July 2nd and July 3rd for holiday! I’ll be back in the community on Monday, July 6th! Use this time to lean on your peers and step up to the plate to assist your fellow students

Student Leader applications are closing on Monday, July 6th at 12pm PDT. Click the link for more information on what Student Leaders are responsible for. There are no extensions, so please make sure to submit them on time!

Study Groups are now live! Check out our new Study Groups page on the Google site to see a directory of Study Groups (scroll down to the bottom) that have been requested. All the details on how to join or create a Study Group are there. I’ve started making some of the channels, so take a good look

As a note, please know that you can rely on the Google site for any questions you have! It’s your one-stop shop for any question you have about the scholarship!

I hope everyone has a great rest of the week and weekend, I’ll see you all soon!

July 1, 2020 (pt.1)

@channel We’ve made our way through the middle of the week, scholars! We are jumping right into rolling out Study Groups today! If you’re hesitant about joining a Study Group, let me hopefully convince you of how beneficial they are. Study Groups are not only a fantastic way to meet and bond with your classmates (especially those in your local area!) but students who belong to a Study Group have historically progressed further in their coursework than those who were working by themselves. If that isn’t a win, I don’t know what is!

There are 2 ways to participate:

• You can start a Study Group

• You can join a Study Group

Find out more on our NEW Study Groups page on the Google site here!

You’ll learn:

• How to start & register a Study Group

• How to request a Slack channel for your Study Group

• How to use the Study Groups Directory to find the right Study Group for you!

Please take the time to read the entire Study Group page before DMin’g me! The page contains EVERYTHING you need to know. Promise!

A few important notes:

The Study Groups Directory (aka list of Study Groups) will be sparse/pretty empty until Organizers start registering their Study Groups!

We will try to work quickly but still please allow until at least Monday, July 6th to have your Slack channel request fulfilled

For everyone who used the Slack channel request form to ask for a location-based channel, please request a channel through the Study Group registration form.

Study Groups are completely optional - in the end, please do what’s right for you! Have fun and go forth!