The year 2020 will be remembered as one of the toughest in recent history. As countries worked to fight against the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, global economies started to dwindle. This led to rampant unemployment and an immediate need for instant reskilling and upskilling.
But humans are resilient and many created opportunities during these tough times. Thousands of Udacity students from across the globe — like Clarisse from Brazil or Ijeoma Ndu from Nigeria or RahulRaj from India or Laura Truncellito from the United States – are transforming their lives with Udacity scholarship programs this year.
Udacity announced various scholarship programs in 2020 — in collaboration with companies like Nutanix, AWS, Microsoft, Bertelsmann . The scholarships were focused on in-demand skills like hybrid cloud, machine learning, data science, and Artificial Intelligence.
We’re proud to say that we helped more than 60,000 aspiring students globally through various scholarship programs this year. Out of these students, around 4,000 have been offered a full scholarship to our Nanodegree programs.
Here’s a round of Udacity Scholarships that were launched this year.
Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Nanodegree Program
Hybrid Cloud has become critically important in recent times. According to a research by cloud solutions provider RightScale, nearly 90% of companies rely on cloud computing. A recent report by IDC estimates the total spending on cloud services to surpass $1 trillion by 2024.
Keeping the growing demand for cloud engineers in mind, we announced the Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Nanodegree program in April 2020. More than 5,000 students around the globe enrolled in the Hybrid Cloud Fundamentals course — the first phase of the scholarship. From this group, 500 high-performing students have been awarded a full scholarship to the Hybrid Cloud Nanodegree program.
The scholarship and the Nanodegree program were designed to enable students to be at the forefront of cloud technology by learning how to design and deploy hybrid cloud infrastructure and applications.
AWS Machine Learning Scholarship Program
The Udacity team partnered with AWS to launch this program. The objective was to offer people an opportunity to learn new skills that will better prepare them for the jobs of the future.
The scholarship was divided into two phases. More than 30,000 applicants enrolled in the first phase and took the foundational course, AWS Machine Learning Foundations Course. Later, the top 325 performing students from the course got a scholarship to Udacity’s Machine Learning Engineer Nanodegree program.
Machine Learning Scholarship Program for Microsoft Azure
This was another scholarship program that we announced this year to train the global workforce in the careers of the future. We collaborated with Microsoft to help professionals learn highly coveted skills in Azure. We kicked off the partnership with the announcement of the Machine Learning Scholarship program for Microsoft Azure.
This scholarship was also designed in two phases. More than 10,000 students joined us for the first phase of the program which included the two-month-long course: Introduction to Machine Learning on Azure with a Low-code Experience. In Oct’20, the 300 top performers were awarded a full scholarship to the new Machine Learning Engineer for Microsoft Azure Nanodegree program.
This scholarship helps strengthen machine learning skills and build practical experience by training, validating, and evaluating models using Azure Machine Learning
2020 Bertelsmann Technology Scholarship Program
Udacity and Bertelsmann announced a three-year commitment to fund 50,000 tech scholarships for students to learn with Udacity. After announcing 15,000 scholarships in 2019, we announced another 15,000 scholarships in fields like Data, AI, and cloud computing this year.
Applicants can apply for one of three tech learning paths — Cloud, Data, or AI — then 15,000 recipients will be selected to participate in one of the following nearly four-month-long challenge courses:
- Introduction to Azure Applications
- Introduction to Problem Solving and Advanced Analytics
- Introduction to AI in Business
You can learn more about the Bertelsmann Technology scholarship program here. You must be 18 years or older to apply, and applications will close on November 16, 2020.
Get More Udacity Scholarship Information
Want to benefit from a Udacity Scholarship program? Check out our Scholarships page to see if there are any available and upcoming scholarships.
