The Anticipation...

…must be killing you, right?

Yes. I was accepted. Surprise!

Udacity had announced that acceptance letters would be e-mailed on October 3, and later clarified that nobody would be left hanging - whether or not you were accepted, you’d be notified. My acceptance letter was timestamped October 4 at 2:23 AM (which I suppose is still technically October 3 if you’re on Pacific time… and your clock is 24 minutes slow). So, October 3 was kind of a long day for me. I finally went to bed around midnight and woke up at 3AM to check my phone.

WOOHOO!!

Jeremy, welcome to our Self-Driving Car program!

Congratulations!

More than 11,000 people applied to the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program. We had an incredible pool of talented and experienced candidates from around the world. I am very pleased to let you know that you have been selected to be a part of the program starting on Monday, December 12, 2016.

I was one of the 500 selected, out of 11,000 applicants! Hooray!

Well, except it turns out that pretty much everyone was accepted. (Doh! After all of that gloating! Not really. Well, kind of.)

Yeah, they split the applicants into an October cohort of 500, November cohort of 1000, December cohort of 2500, and then the rest in Januray. Whatever! I’m on board. The team at Udacity decided that turning away thousands would go against their core value of “students first”, which I respect. I’m glad I get to take part in this program, whatever the circumstances. And waiting another month and a half (beyond the start of the October cohort) isn’t the end of the world. In fact, I can get a head start on some of the topics covered in the nanodegree, like Deep Learning and Computer Vision.

December 12 can’t get here soon enough!