My Life Experience In The Microsoft Machine Learning Foundation Course on Udacity

While I celebrate our independence day and the new month of October, I want to celebrate the past few months as one of the scholars in the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Scholarship challenge on Udacity.

When I got the selection mail back in July, I was excited and I actually thought this would be more like other programs I've been selected for previously. But this was totally different and life changing.

One of the differences about this program was the focus on community participation as one of the key requirement to proceed asides course completion. This was said repeatedly by our community managers(amazing folks) and prior to this, I haven't really been a fan of online communities, but because of that clause, I decided to try to be active at least few times a week.

So, the initial motivating factor for me was the community participation thing as a key requirement to get into the next stage of the scholarship in an international community of over 6000 students. 

I didn't know that something was about to change in me. Shortly, I applied for student leader position to enable me take up more responsibility and "participate more" in the community and luckily I was selected. That's where the journey began.

I was introduced to fellow student leaders in the channel in persons of Arshi Saleh and Muhammed Saad and we quickly got to know ourselves and plan for our new roles.

And we got to work.. I was trying to "participate" by answering questions, sharing summaries from my learnings and all.. and then midway something began to change. My motivation began to change as I saw how those little things were really having an impact on other students. It meant a lot to them and while interacting with them I began to feel the joy they had in getting through a difficulty by virtue of my answers. This made me really happy. 

And the joy was infectious. I started reaching out more to some of them whenever I had the time and little by little this became a habit. I found myself making out time in the evenings when I'm back from work, just to put a smile on a students face.

It sort of became addictive.. because the more I assisted others and planned sessions for them, the happier I became. It was no longer about getting in the next phase, it became about genuinely wanting to help others and I saw this new desire begin to grow in me. Myself, Arshi and Muhammed even went out of our way, to come up with events, webinars and games that could just put a smile on someone's face.

We kept up with this till we concluded phase 1 yesterday night. It was an emotional moment for everyone of us and I actually feel that what happened to me may have happened to many other people. We had bonded without even knowing it as a united people working towards a common goal. And it was hard to say goodbye. 

The program consisted of various lessons on Supervised learning, unsupervised learning, feature engineering, deep learning, Microsoft azure managed services for ML, Responsible AI and more. There were also a couple of labs that gave us some hands on experience on building and deploying models using Azure ML Studio.

It's been a series of Study Jams, Lovely study groups where I met a lot of amazing folks, challenges, events especially Tambolaa.. I won't forget that one in a hurry. 

All these taught me some lessons: What really matters in life is not necessary the skills or amount of money you have in your pocket. It is the quality of your relationship with people and how you are able to use what you have to help them that counts!

And you don't have to be perfect in something before you can share that thing with someone else. Whatever you can share with others no matter how little can transform their lives in ways you can't imagine. 

Naturally, man tends to be selfish at first, but ultimately man is happier and more likely to reach his potential when he begins to look beyond his "interests" and makes an attempt to solve another's problem.

Always challenge yourself especially when you're in doubt. New challenges could lead you to discover something new about yourself and your gifts!

Those are priceless life lessons for me!

This is a special Thank you to everyone of you who was part of creating these experiences. We move on to greater heights!