CXL Scholarship — 12th Week Review
This is officially the end. I have done the entire mini degree and you know what? I’m kind of proud of myself. Believe me I’m not bragging about this achievement. But I think you would accept that after being in the program and getting to the end is some sort of a big thing that you need to be happy about.
When I started this program
When I started this program, it was in the second wave of coronavirus pandemic and the whole world was grappling with the repercussions of this tsunami-like disaster. I lost my job just before it and had tried to find a job to be able provide my family again. But it seemed kind of impossible because the entire job market had great difficulties. I wasn’t the only one who had lost his/her job and while I was looking for a new job, there were others who were looking for a job in parallel. Companies were in the process of downsizing on the other hand and this sent a signal to me and others not to wait for any good news, at least in the near future.
I needed to change the way I looked at the world around me and find a new way for making money. I felt the need to develop myself and my capabilities to make myself more marketable. Companies were looking for better people with a broader range of skills and this told me that I needed more serious skills to develop. In the process of this thinking about this, I got exposed to a download website that had great courses available for free download and guess what? One of the courses was about conversion optimization and it had this strange name on it: CXL. I didn’t know about CXL and the services it had. I got curious about this CXL thing and hit its website. Damn man! It looked and felt professional and I thought this might be the way.
About CXL Institute
CXL had some courses on it as well as learning paths called mini degrees. It was pretty obvious that enrolling for one of these courses and paths isn’t cheap. Especially for a guy like me who had lost his job and had serious troubles with living in Iran. I actually believed that paying 1000 bucks isn’t easy, even for european and american people. Anyways, I suddenly found that the guys and gals at CXL have something called a scholarship and if you get accepted in it, they’ll let you take it for FREE! How great was that?
Let’s be frank with each other. First I thought they wouldn’t accept me and my request. Because you know what? Who would accept a middle easterner from a country like Iran? If you just listen to any news channel for 5 minutes, you’ll think about me as a man who is living in a shitty country who doesn’t deserve to be part of a good program like this one. But I didn’t think about the CXL team this way. I didn’t want to be pessimistic and lose my hope about the world. I have known that the world doesn’t work the way we think, based on our knowledge from news and social media. I thinked and still think that humanity is something more valuable than anything else all over the world. We are basically brothers and sisters with each other and this is the most important thing. So I decided to write an article containing around 500 words to the CXL team and ask them to let me enter the program.
one week after I applied for this mini degree, I got an email which had the good news: YOU ARE ACCEPTED! The email read. This was like a dream came true for me and I started absorbing it bit by bit and bite by bite. And after 11 weeks, I did it. I owe this knowledge and certificate to the great guys of CXL who gave me this opportunity.
About What I have learned
Now that I look back, I understand that I know the basics of conversion optimization and how to make my way through it. Now I can understand what it takes to be an optimizer and know that CRO isn’t just about A/B testing. I know that CRO isn’t just about a single field and is a conclusive study. You need to know about statistics, marketing, psychology, analytics, behavior and a lot of other things. The course was arranged in such a good way that day by day, I felt the change in myself. I gradually started to know that what is the true meaning of being data-driven and when they say data is always appreciated, what they actually mean.
I learned that if you need to persuade others, you have to have high level skills like programming in R language and be able to visualize data in a meaningful way. It is a bliss to know that you have to improve negotiation skills in yourself and get to a point that people believe what you are telling them. It was mainly because of the people I had the honor of meeting, virtually!
About the people I have known because of this
The first one of them was Peep Laja himself for sure. Peep has a weird accent that you need some time to get used to. But he has an overloaded mind filled with everything that is needed for conversion optimization. He has to have the knowledge about all of these notions and know how to present them in such a meaningful way. Peep, I’ll be thankful to you for the rest of my life for sure.
The other guy was Chris Mercer that gave me the feeling of enjoying data measurement. During the GA and GTM courses, I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen and this was because of his specific method of teaching. I’ll be sure to continue this way and follow my career as a digital analytics guy.
There were other practitioners who I had the chance to learn from, but one of the guys that I need to mention wasn’t among the tutors of this mini degree. But he is one of the tutors at the CXL institute and he is Simo Ahava. He is one of a kind and I’ve just found him. He is the true meaning of a technical marketer. By knowing these people, I’m not the person who started this mini degree any more. I feel that I’ve been born once again!
About the new person I have become after this
And now I’m a completely different person. Someone who knows he needs to make some changes in his professional career. I know that digital analytics is and will be my field of interest for the rest of my life and I will penetrate its most deep corners.
I want to thank Rene and Maria who replied to me whenever I reached out to them for help, and they did this support very fast. I also want to thank Alex Atkins who was very supportive during this period and taught me a great deal of stuff.
I don’t want to make it too long, again.
Thank you for being true human beings.
Mohammad Sammak
Nov 2020 / Aban 1399
