Self-Driving Car Engineer

It was engaging and challenging enough to have me interested and not so challenging that it would put me off.  Overall, great experience!  Learning by doing is the best way to figure out what tools and knowledge you need to solve a problem.

I loved the materials.  Unfortunately, much of my time during the term was disrupted by outside events, so I was unable to complete the projects.  The time estimates provided on the website for completing the various modules were too optimistic in my case -- most of them required much more time than was indicated.  Nevertheless, I found the materials rich and relevant.  I wish I had had more time to devote to the program.UPDATE: The above paragraph was based on my experience with Udacity two years ago.  I am now back in the program for Self-Driving Car Engineering.  The material is still great and has been expanded since the first time I was in the program.  Udacity has also increased their use of mentors to help keep students from getting stuck.  My mentor has been very helpful and has provided lots of encouraging feedback and suggestions.

I took this course when it was first announced. Coming from a non-software engineer background, I assumed it would be hard. I was not wrong but the Udacity curriculum enables myself to learn the steps slowly and very beginner-friendly. The content of this course matches industry requirement. Now, I am working in a self-driving car startup due to my enrolment in this course.

Udacity Curriculum and Teaching does not spoon-feed the student. Rather, it provokes due thought process in you to seek and apply the knowledge with aptly challenging time-bound assignments.

Pride to say that I am a "Self Driving Car Engineer" Nano Degree Holder.

Currently pursuing Bertelsmann Data Science Nanodegree and Intel Vino AI Nano Degrees with due scholarships. Thanks, Udacity & Sponsors.

First of all, I need to say that I finished two ND programs, and they significantly pushed my skills forward!

Pros.

1. The school gives both a broad and deep understanding of all the necessary disciplines behind such an emerging area as self-driving cars. It includes Machine Learning and Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Sensor Fusion, Dynamics, Estimation and Control, etc.

2. Mentors give comprehensive advises and always ready to support. You have a high-skilled professional to help you. There are also many ways to interact with other students and discuss study problems. The classroom already has an "embedded" forum and analogs of "Slack" and "Stackoverflow." It is handy to rapidly find the student who stuck on the same issue or, probably, resolved it.

3. The courses are not limited by coding only. It also has a practical part. For example, in SDC ND, we had a team project. The group of five coders, spread around the world from Brazil to China, created the autopilot for a self-driving car in the simulator. Later on, this code was tested on the real Self-Driving Car in UDACITY!!! And now, I have a video proof of our code, tested on Carla (SDC)!!! To sum up, I gained highly valued experience of work in an international team and creating the code for a real car - it is a "cherry on top" of my resume!

4. Career Coaches give a very deep insight into career development and job change personally for you! Before the discussion, they have already reviewed the CV, Linkedin, and have a solution for you.

Cons.

1. The price is high and probably higher than many other boot camps. However, UDACITY worth it.

You can't learn about self driving vehicle technology and science better than you can learn it from this program at Udacity, unless you are graduating from the Stanford University lab, where Dr. Thurn developed the first self driving car ever.

That should say it all. How do I know ?

I have been in embedded software engineering for 25 years and this course covers all that one needs to be an effective autonomous vehicle engineer. 
Dr. Thurn and its team have the uncanny ability to explain complex topics with a functional, effective, practical approach, that will give you a concrete understanding of the math and algorithms required to work and design autonomous vehicles. The projects are well done and the the fact Udacity actually has engineers double check your work, rather than just rely on your peers' feedback like other online learning sites do, is key to make your learning experience effective and validated, but most of all, taken seriously from actual employers.  

 The topics you will learn are state of the art.

Note: the approach taken is the LIDAR based one (you will learn what that is, if you don't know yet) rather than the cameras only based one, which is Tesla's approach to self driving vehicles. Nowhere in the course is the debate about what is the best approach introduced or discussed. The industry, beside Tesla, has decided to go LIDAR. 
It still remains to be seen which approach will ultimately win... so to speak.

Important to understand is that Tesla is the only company that has decided to drop the LIDAR, but even Tesla would appreciate your understating of how LIDARs work, should you consider applying for a job there. 

Everybody else will require you to understand how LIDARs fit into an autonomous vehicle approach.

If you want to learn about self driving vehicle technology so to have a real world opportunity to make it your job, then this is the course for you.

What do you like best?

I used Udacity to learn Intro to Self Driving Nano Degree Program and Self Driving Nano Degree (SDND) Program. I liked the way they have created the content from basics to more advanced and complex concepts. They had online work-space setup to solve the problems. This helped me understand the concepts in a better way. The way the course was organized made it easy for me to grasp the concepts quickly and implement them efficiently. Plus they have real life projects based on autonomous vehicles, this helped me build a great portfolio to showcase to my new employers and helped me in the job change.

Because of this I also enrolled in Sensor Fusion Nano Degree (SFND) Program with them again.

What do you dislike?

In the Intro to SDND program they had assigned one to one mentor for each candidate, this helped me solve my problems quickly, but in the SDND program they took away the personal 1:1 mentor concept instead they introduced student hub where students plus few mentors would solve your problem collectively. This caused some problems as our conversations were lost there and sometimes the questions remained unanswered. They should improve the student hub as it is not much user friendly.

Another thing that I disliked about them is the setup to run the programs on local machine for windows user is not much intuitive. I faced lot of issues while setting up the work-space locally on my machine. They setup for Ubuntu users is pretty simple and straightforward. Later to counter this issue I bought a workstation and created a dual boot Ubuntu system for the Sensor Fusion Nano Degree (SFND) Program.

They have LinkedIn, GitHub review services included in the SDND program. They also have career services that can help you with your job search once you are done with the coursework. One thing I disliked about this was there should be an option to opt out of GitHub and LinkedIn review temporarily. Due to time constraints I skipped Github review during SDND program, now I don't have it available when I bought SFND program, I will have to pay extra to buy it separately. They had clearly mentioned about this, but they should take into consideration personal constraints and allow us to postpone it within the one year after the graduation from the course. This would be really helpful.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

I would suggest having a little bit knowledge about Ubuntu, bash scripting basics and at least a dual boot PC with Ubuntu as one of the OS, and using it for the coursework.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I am an engineer and I wanted to learn the engineering behind Self Driving cars and wanted to switch my career in the autonomous vehicles field. The concepts taught in this course are directly applied in the field. This helped me understand the engineering behind autonomous vehicles. I was able to create my own project portfolio. This helped me change my job which led to salary and benefit increment.

Good overview of Self-Driving sutable to get into the industry to start solving problems as an Engineer! would recomend!