Advanced Udacity Deep Learning Nanodegree

I have noticed that some of my classmates - Facebook Pytorch scholars, they went fast and far beyond what's required of the nanodegree. Here are some of the impressive things they did.

• Train model from scratch rather than using a pretrained model. "Try using more convolution layers, increasing the depth, decreasing learning rate, and keep the final fc layer simple, I used only one fc layer after the convolution layers" "It depends on how many epochs to train. I just did 35 epochs. Similar to VGG."
• How long did it take for you all to train your cnn from scratch model? GPU use. Some move the training to Google Colab.