In what degree is the material tailored for cars vs other forms of autonomous vehicles? Would you say the knowledge transferable to, for example, autonomous drones?
We had way more demand than we expected so while you may have applied for October, we were only able to get you a spot for November. We're doing this to make sure that you have all the support you need in the program. If we tried to take everyone in the October batch we wouldn't have been able to deliver the quality we wanted as our human support services are not quite ready for that scale yet but will be ready by November. Hope that answers the question!
That's exactly right. We have terms opening on different months so that you have a community of students you do the program with.
What percentage of students who complete the program would you expect to be able to get a job as a Self-Driving car engineer?
It's hard for me to give a number for a few reasons:
1. Not everyone applying actually wants a job. A lot of people are taking this program just out of curiosity and interest. 2. It really depends on where you live. People in the Bay Area, Germany, and the Michigan area are going to be closer to employment opportunities than other.
That being said, we are optimizing the entire program to be such that the projects you create are things that employers want. And we've verified this by building the program with employers from the beginning.
My name is Dhruv ([email protected]) and I lead the Self-Driving Car Nanodegree program here at Udacity. I'm happy to answer questions directly on this note (email me!). I think this program will be very different from our existing Nanodegrees as we have real industry partners who are extremely invested in making sure the program is high quality from the get go. This is because they want to be able to increase their hiring pipelines as soon as possible. We've been determining what projects/content to create by asking our hiring partners (and Sebastian Thrun) what they would want to see in a portfolio of someone they hire. We then work back from there and iterate to create the content. So far, folks at Mercedes-Benz, Otto, NVIDIA, and a few other auto companies have gone over our syllabus, given us feedback, and helped us iterate. I'm trying my hardest to make this program something I would myself take to get into the field or learn more about it(I'm an Engineer by trade who moved into this role!).