There are so many resources out there that can teach you deep learning, and if you are reading this, you are probably wondering which one you should pursue.

那里有很多资源可以教您深度学习，如果您正在阅读本文，您可能想知道应该追求哪种。

I wrote this article to share the course I took that not only helped me to get a good grasp of deep learning in about 9 months, but also allowed me to become a part of a supportive community that helps each other grow.

我写这篇文章是为了分享我参加的课程，不仅帮助我在大约9个月的时间里很好地掌握了深度学习，还使我成为了一个互相支持的支持社区的一部分。

Let me share my story.

让我分享我的故事。

学习之旅 (Journey Towards Learning)

I previously documented my journey to learn data science in Towards Data Science and I was amazed by how much it resonated with others. Many people told me that they found my article helpful and inspiring, so next, I wanted to share my journey in deep learning. If you are interested, you can read my previous article below.

之前，我在《迈向数据科学》中记录了学习数据科学的旅程，而它与他人的共鸣让我感到惊讶。 许多人告诉我，他们发现我的文章很有帮助和鼓舞人心，所以接下来，我想分享我的深度学习之旅。 如果您有兴趣，可以在下面阅读我的上一篇文章。

Through learning data science, I became exposed to machine learning which made me interested in deep learning and AI. However, I didn’t know how I could learn it because it seemed so complicated.

通过学习数据科学，我开始接触机器学习，这使我对深度学习和AI产生了兴趣。 但是，我不知道如何学习，因为它看起来是如此复杂。

It was around this time last year that I found out about a scholarship Udacity created with Bertelsmann where recipients could be awarded a chance to complete a deep learning, data analyst, or cloud computing nanodegree at no cost.

大约在去年的这个时候，我发现了Udacity与贝塔斯曼(Bertelsmann)合作创建的一项奖学金，获奖者将有机会免费获得深度学习，数据分析师或云计算纳米学位的奖学金。

Side Note: The scholarship for this year has just opened up and you can apply here. You can also check out other available ones on Udacity’s scholarship page.

旁注：今年的奖学金刚刚开放，您可以在这里申请。 您也可以在Udacity的奖学金页面上查看其他可用的项目。

I ended up applying for the scholarship, was accepted, and moved on to be awarded the deep learning nanodegree!

我最终申请了奖学金，被接受了，然后继续被授予深度学习纳米学位！

Let me tell you how I did it and how it helped me to learn deep learning.

让我告诉您我是如何做到的，以及它如何帮助我学习深度学习。

奖学金申请流程 (Scholarship Application Process)

The first step is applying for the scholarship. You have to choose which track you want to pursue(AI, Data, or Cloud), so I chose the AI track. As part of the application process, you have to answer some questions such as:

第一步是申请奖学金。 您必须选择要追踪的轨道(AI，数据或云)，所以我选择了AI轨道。 在申请过程中，您必须回答一些问题，例如：

• Background Information (Your personal details and desired track).
  背景信息(您的个人详细信息和所需的跟踪)。
• Prerequisite Knowledge (Your experience level in coding).
  必备知识(您的编码经验水平)。
• Your Goals (Purpose in participating in the scholarship program and what you would do with the newly obtained skills).
  您的目标(参加奖学金计划以及您将如何使用新获得的技能)。
• Technical questions (depending on your chosen track).
  技术问题(取决于您选择的路线)。

The application process would likely be different for different scholarships, but these are the ones I had to answer.

对于不同的奖学金，申请过程可能会有所不同，但这是我必须回答的问题。

Udacity then selected 15,000 people to participate in the challenge course and I was one of them!

然后，Udacity选择了15,000人参加挑战赛，而我就是其中之一！

挑战课程 (The Challenge Course)

Since I chose the AI track, the challenge course I did was the Intro to Deep Learning with PyTorch course. This course teaches you the basics of deep learning, and how to build your own deep neural networks using PyTorch. The syllabus includes:

自从我选择AI轨道以来，我所面临的挑战课程是“ PyTorch深度学习入门”课程。 本课程教您深度学习的基础知识，以及如何使用PyTorch构建自己的深度神经网络。 教学大纲包括：

1. Introduction to Deep Learning
   深度学习导论
2. Introduction to PyTorch
   PyTorch简介
3. Deep Learning with PyTorch
   使用PyTorch进行深度学习
4. Convolutional Neural Networks
   卷积神经网络
5. Style Transfer
   样式转移
6. Recurrent Neural Networks
   递归神经网络
7. Natural Language Classification
   自然语言分类
8. Deploying with PyTorch
   使用PyTorch进行部署

I liked the course because it allowed me to go from having basic Python/data science skills to being able to implement my own AI code that could classify photos, generate text, and other cool things. They also provided all the notebooks you need to train/run the neural networks, which make it easier to learn.

我喜欢这门课程，因为它使我从拥有基本的Python /数据科学技能转变为能够实现自己的AI代码，该代码可以对照片进行分类，生成文本和其他有趣的东西。 他们还提供了训练/运行神经网络所需的所有笔记本，使学习变得更加容易。

松弛社区 (Slack Community)

There were two requirements needed in order to be awarded the nanodegree.

为了获得纳米学位，需要满足两个要求。

1. Completion of the challenge course.
   完成挑战课程。
2. Slack community participation.
   社区参与松懈。

完成挑战课程 (Complete the challenge course)

The first requirement is easy.

第一个要求很简单。

If you spend a few hours a week working on the challenge course, you should be able to complete it in the 3.5 month timeline. Not to mention that nothing is graded, so it is really up to you to make sure you have completed the course. Technically you can just click through all the lessons without completing it, but that leads us to the second requirement.

如果您每周花几个小时从事挑战课程，那么您应该能够在3.5个月的时间表内完成该课程。 更不用说什么都没有评分，因此确保您完成课程确实取决于您。 从技术上讲，您可以单击所有课程而不完成它，但这将我们带到了第二个要求。

社区参与不力 (Slack community participation)

Udacity creates a Slack workspace for each track of the scholarship program and expects students to participate in it. This requirement is likely there to make sure people aren’t just clicking through the course in order to complete it and actually goes through the material.

Udacity为奖学金计划的每个阶段创建了一个Slack工作区，并希望学生参加。 这项要求很可能会确保人们不仅仅是为了完成课程而是真正地遍历材料而单击课程。

So what does participation mean?

那么参与意味着什么？

It means you have to help other students out, either technically and/or to engage with the community.

这意味着您必须在技术上和/或与社区互动方面帮助其他学生。

There are many ways to do this including:

有很多方法可以做到这一点，包括：

• Answer student’s technical questions on the course (e.g. answering in the Slack channels, writing/sharing Medium articles, etc).
  在课程中回答学生的技术问题(例如，在Slack频道中回答，撰写/分享中级文章等)。
• Create a webinar/presentation walking through how you would tackle a course problem.
  创建一个网络研讨会/演示，介绍如何解决课程问题。
• Start a resource to answer frequently asked questions.
  启动资源以回答常见问题。
• Design initiatives for student’s to get to know each other (e.g. start a question thread and tag others, share stories and encourage others to do the same).
  为学生设计互相了解的举措(例如，开始提问并标记其他人，分享故事并鼓励其他人也这样做)。
• Generate initiatives to help students understand the course material (such as with tech challenges, study jams, and games).
  提出计划以帮助学生理解课程材料(例如技术挑战，学习障碍和游戏)。
• Help encourage others to complete the course by posting motivational messages in the channels and celebrate other’s successes.
  通过在频道中发布激励性信息并庆祝他人的成功来帮助鼓励他人完成课程。
• Initiate a study group about a topic you are interested in (e.g. location-based, medical, etc) and encourage people to start projects in them.
  发起一个有关您感兴趣的主题的研究小组(例如，基于位置的，医学的等)，并鼓励人们在其中开展项目。
• Share the notes you took from the lessons.
  分享您从课程中获得的笔记。
• Build a database of helpful resources on Airtable, Github, or Google Docs.
  在Airtable，Github或Google Docs上建立有用资源的数据库。
• Just anything that helps others!
  只是任何可以帮助他人的东西！

What participation does not mean is:

参与并不意味着：

• Just liking others’ posts.
  只是喜欢别人的帖子。
• Commenting low quality responses like: “Thanks for sharing”, or “Great photo”.
  评论低质量的回复，例如：“谢谢分享”或“很棒的照片”。
• Repeating answers that others have already shared.
  重复其他人已经分享的答案。
• Contributing for the sake of contributing without really helping others.
  为了做出贡献而做出的贡献却没有真正帮助别人。

Udacity regularly clarifies the participation aspect of the program and stated that if you spend about 15 minutes a day looking through Slack and answering people’s questions, or posting quality content, then you should have a good chance of receiving the nanodegree.

Udacity会定期阐明该计划的参与方面，并指出，如果您每天花费大约15分钟浏览Slack并回答人们的问题或发布高质量的内容，那么您应该有很大的机会获得纳米学位。

Udacity如何衡量您的参与？ (How does Udacity gauge your participation?)

Udacity doesn’t share this information.

Udacity不共享此信息。

Many people hypothesized that they have a Slack extension that can help them visualize the top students, but this was not confirmed because that info was not made available to us. The most likely way they gauge the participation is through their community managers (CM) who are also in the Slack workspace. Those CM’s monitor the day-to-day activity of the channels and develop a pretty good idea of who the students who consistently contribute high quality content to the community are.

许多人以为他们有一个Slack扩展名，可以帮助他们可视化顶尖的学生，但这并未得到证实，因为该信息未提供给我们。 他们评估参与度的最可能方法是通过同样在Slack工作区中的社区经理(CM)。 那些CM监视频道的日常活动，并很好地了解谁向社区一贯贡献高质量内容。

程序启动 (Program Initatives)

There are some Udacity created initiatives that you can take advantage of in order to increase your community participation.

您可以利用Udacity创建的一些计划来增加社区参与度。

学生领袖 (Student Leaders)

Shortly after the start of the challenge course, your CM will put out a call for student leaders (SL). As the Slack community is so large, it becomes difficult for the CM’s to keep track of everything, and that is where the SL’s come in. There will be several SL’s for each Slack channel and they will be dedicated to ensuring the intent of the channel is realized. The SL’s are also expected to create initiatives for the channel they are assigned to.

挑战课程开始后不久，您的CM将召集学生领袖(SL)。 由于Slack社区很大，因此CM很难跟踪所有内容，而这正是SL的来历。每个Slack频道都会有多个SL，它们将致力于确保频道的意图被实现。 SL也将为其分配的频道创建计划。

For example, if you are a leader for a technical channel, you would help answer technical questions, and create initiatives to help students understand/learn the concepts better.

例如，如果您是技术渠道的领导者，则可以帮助您回答技术问题，并可以制定计划来帮助学生更好地理解/学习概念。

For me, I was chosen to be an SL for the #Introductions channel so my team created a challenge where students shared personal details about themselves to help get to know one another better. We also organized a form to collect everyone’s social media pages to allow for further connections.

对我来说，我被选为#Introductions频道的SL，因此我的团队提出了一个挑战，学生可以分享自己的个人详细信息，以帮助彼此更好地了解。 我们还组织了一个表格来收集每个人的社交媒体页面，以允许进一步的联系。

The initiatives you create are largely up to you, so be creative! For example, we created a picture collage of all the students which helped instill a sense of community.

您创建的计划在很大程度上取决于您，因此要发挥创造力！ 例如，我们为所有学生创建了图片拼贴画，这有助于灌输社区感。

To become a student leader, you have to apply and be chosen. A part of the application process will be to share what leadership experience you have, why you would be a good leader, and to choose your channel preference.

要成为学生领袖，您必须申请并被选中。 申请过程的一部分将是分享您所拥有的领导经验，为什么会成为一名优秀的领导者，并选择您的渠道偏好。

学习果酱 (Study Jam)

A study jam is a one to two day event where SL’s as well as other student volunteers spend a large amount of time helping others get through the course material. There is actually an SL dedicated to organizing the study jam, and their job is to plan the event including recruiting others to lead/organize webinars, ask me anything sessions (AMAs), and presentations on the day of. There is also a lot of work needed before the event to manage logistics and marketing, so there are many ways to get involved.

学习果酱是一到两天的活动，在此活动中，SL和其他学生志愿者花费大量时间来帮助其他人阅读课程材料。 实际上，有一个SL专门用来组织学习果酱，他们的工作是计划活动，包括招募其他人来领导/组织网络研讨会，向我询问任何会议(AMA)和当天的演讲。 活动开展前还需要进行大量工作来管理物流和市场营销，因此有很多参与方式。

This is a very good opportunity to get some participation points!

这是获得参与点的绝佳机会！

AMA会议 (AMA Sessions)

Every week, there would be an AMA session where a CM allocates an hour of time to answer any non-technical questions that students have. Usually these would be during business hours during when the CM is working, so it might limit who can attend depending on their timezone. However, this is a very easy way to increase your participation as usually the questions are easy to answer. Many questions are also quite repetitive, so you can further increase your community engagement by creating nice posts/guides to answer these common questions.

每周都会有一个AMA会话，CM将分配一个小时的时间来回答学生遇到的任何非技术性问题。 通常这些时间是在CM工作期间的工作时间内，因此可能会限制谁可以参加，具体取决于他们的时区。 但是，这是增加您的参与度的一种非常简单的方法，因为通常问题很容易回答。 许多问题也很重复，因此您可以通过创建漂亮的帖子/指南来回答这些常见问题，从而进一步提高社区参与度。

Some students even created a bot that automatically transcribed all the questions and answers so people who missed the session could refer back to it.

一些学生甚至创建了一个自动记录所有问题和答案的机器人，以便错过会议的人可以参考它。

Udacity的60天 (60 Days of Udacity)

Udacity encourages students to study daily and to document their work on a special #60DaysOfUdacity channel.

Udacity鼓励学生每天学习并在特殊的＃60DaysOfUdacity频道上记录其工作。

You can document which part of the course or other coding work you did and even add in aspects of your daily life. I saw many student’s share motivational stories/pictures that definitely added to their participation as it spurred more conversations.

您可以记录您完成了课程的哪一部分或其他编码工作，甚至可以增加日常生活的各个方面。 我看到许多学生分享的励志故事/图片确实增加了他们的参与度，因为这激发了更多的对话。

关于Slack社区参与的思考 (Thoughts on the Slack community participation)

Although having to always contribute on Slack can get tedious (I think I spent more time on Slack than the challenge course!), it is still an invaluable experience. Not only did I make friends that I still keep in contact with, but the willingness of everyone to help each other learn and grow is what truly made this experience memorable.

尽管必须始终为Slack做出贡献会变得很乏味(我认为我在Slack上花费的时间比挑战课程还要多！)，但这仍然是一种宝贵的经验。 我不仅结交了仍与我保持联系的朋友，而且每个人都愿意互相帮助学习和成长，这才真正使这一经历令人难忘。

Everyone might have started out helping each other on Slack because of the participation requirement, but by the end, they continued because they really wanted to see each other succeed and reach new heights. I think this community instilled in me a dedication to help others.

由于参与要求，每个人都可能开始在Slack上互相帮助，但最后，他们继续，因为他们真的希望看到彼此成功并达到新的高度。 我认为这个社区向我灌输了帮助他人的奉献精神。

概要 (Summary)

To summarize, the key to being awarded the nanodegree is to:

总而言之，获得纳米学位的关键是：

• Be consistent.
  始终如一。
• Always be helping others.
  一直在帮助别人。

That’s it!

而已！

深度学习纳米学位 (The Deep Learning Nanodegree)

After I got access to the deep learning nanodegree, I had about 6 months to complete it.

获得深度学习纳米学位后，我有大约6个月的时间完成了学习。

The syllabus included:

教学大纲包括：

1. Neural Networks
   神经网络
2. Convolutional Neural Networks
   卷积神经网络
3. Recurrent Neural Networks
   递归神经网络
4. Generative Adversarial Networks
   生成对抗网络
5. Deployment
   部署方式

You will notice that the nanodegree has many topics that are the same as the Introduction to Deep Learning with PyTorch course, so many lessons were actually already completed when I logged in.

您会注意到，纳米学位的许多主题与PyTorch深度学习入门课程相同，因此，当我登录时，实际上已经完成了许多课程。

挑战过程和纳米程度之间的差异 (Differences between the challenge course and the nanodegree)

Projects

专案

Besides the new lessons the nanodegree has, the main difference is the projects and evaluation by Udacity reviewers. Once you completed a project, it would get reviewed and you would be provided feedback to help you improve on it.

除了纳米学位的新课程外，主要区别在于Udacity审稿人的项目和评估。 完成项目后，将对其进行审核，并会提供反馈以帮助您改进它。

Projects include:

项目包括：

1. Predicting Bike-Sharing Patterns
   预测自行车共享模式
2. Dog-Breed Classifier
   狗品种分类器
3. Generate TV Scripts
   生成电视脚本
4. Generate Faces
   产生面Kong
5. Deploying A Sentiment Analysis Model
   部署情绪分析模型

If you downloaded all the content provided from Udacity’s Github page for the challenge course, you actually have access to material for the above projects. So even if you didn’t get awarded the nanodegree, you could still work on the projects yourself.

如果您从Udacity的Github页面下载了挑战课程的所有内容，则实际上您可以访问上述项目的材料。 因此，即使您没有获得纳米学位，您仍然可以自己从事这些项目。

Student Community

学生社区

You also get access to a student community within the Udacity platform where you can communicate with other people taking the nanodegree to ask questions. It is similar to the Slack community, but less organized in my opinion so I didn’t end up using it.

您还可以访问Udacity平台内的学生社区，在这里您可以与其他获得纳米学位的人交流，以提问。 它与Slack社区类似，但在我看来组织性较差，因此我没有最终使用它。

Question Forum

问题论坛

Finally, there is a forum where you can post questions and have Udacity mentors answer them which can be very helpful.

最后，这里有一个论坛，您可以在其中发布问题，并让Udacity导师回答问题，这可能会很有帮助。

向前进 (Moving Forward)

The Slack community closes down a few weeks after the challenge course ends, and everyone was bummed out about it, but one of the students created a new workspace so that we could continue the community afterwards and stay connected. That new Slack community is still going strong to this day! So this provided another platform where we could get help on the nanodegree.

挑战课程结束几周后，Slack社区关闭，每个人都为此感到困惑，但是其中一名学生创建了一个新的工作区，以便我们以后可以继续社区并保持联系。 直到今天，新的Slack社区仍在发展！ 因此，这提供了另一个平台，我们可以在纳米平台上获得帮助。

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to complete the nanodegree in time because, life happens, but I was able to save some of the content so that I can work on it more slowly at my own pace. I look forward to sharing more projects from what I learn from the nanodegree with you soon! I am also planning on applying for the upcoming Udacity x Bertelsmann scholarship, so maybe our paths will cross there?

不幸的是，我无法及时完成纳米级的研究，因为生活发生了，但是我能够保存一些内容，因此我可以按照自己的速度更慢地进行研究。 我期待与您分享从纳米学位中学到的更多项目！ 我还计划申请即将到来的Udacity x Bertelsmann奖学金，所以也许我们的道路会跨越那里？

结语 (Wrapping Up)

This was a pretty long post. If you’ve made it all the way here. Thank you for reading!

这是一篇相当长的文章。 如果您在这里一直做到。 感谢您的阅读！

I’ve been wanting to write this article to share how you can get a Udacity scholarship/free nanodegree for a while. I hope that by sharing my experiences and the steps I took, it will help you to discover your own path to learning.

我一直想写这篇文章，分享一段时间内如何获得Udacity奖学金/免费纳米学位。 我希望通过分享我的经验和我采取的步骤，它将帮助您发现自己的学习道路。

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave your feedback below. You can also follow me on Linkedin or connect with me here.

如果您有任何疑问或意见，请随时在下面留下您的反馈。 您也可以在Linkedin上关注我或在此处与我联系。