10,000 hours of physics

I recently finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, in which he advances the idea that, regardless of your innate talents, in order to achieve true expertise at any complex task, 10,000 hours of practice are required. It's an interesting argument, and the various studies he discusses seem to support this idea forcefully. I got to thinking -- how many hours have I spent purposefully doing at least college-level physics, with the intent to improve my skill at it?

I remember the first time I really put in a lot of time learning physics was for the second semester of the introductory physics courses at UGA, the one that covered basic electricity and magnetism, and optics. That stuff was hard when I first learned it; it's not like the first semester, which covers mechanics, which could be tackled in a pretty common-sense way without spending a lot of time on it. I probably spent about 15 hours a week just on that one class -- so over a semester, something like 240 hours. Then there was linear algebra, which probably was about the same -- 240 hours total for a semester. When I actually started my physics degree, I switched over to taking a full load of physics courses every semester. A full load of physics courses, not surprisingly, is pretty time-intensive. I'd say I averaged at least 40 or 50 hours per week. Including the one semester I spent taking a bunch of random engineering classes at Georgia Tech (which was essentially the same skill-set), that's 5 semesters total -- three at UGA, and two at Tech -- so, assuming 45 hours per week, roughly 3600 hours.

My first year at UCSF was a nightmarish amount of work, but a significant chunk of that time was spent learning random biological material (in particular, structural biology), and learning practical lab skills, neither of which is really the same skill-set as physics, in my mind. So although I was easily spending 80 hours a week studying and/or doing research, I'd say 20 of those, maximum, count in the tally. Probably more in the spring, less in the winter. If it's 20 average, then about 960 for my first year. Second year I TA'd, and had to spend an abnormal amount of time studying statistical physics, then I switched labs to my current lab, where I spend essentially all my time doing physics. So, probably 40 hours per week during the academic year, so about 1440 total. That summer, I spent almost literally every waking hour obsessing over a new tensor method I was trying to develop to analyze a model for interacting magnetic particles (the Ising model) -- I easily totaled 80 hours per week, if not more, over about 3 months, so 960 hours total. Since then, I've settled into a more normal routine; probably around 40 hours per week -- around another 960 hours.

So, tallying it all up: 240 + 240 + 3600 + 960 + 1440 + 960 + 960 = 8400 hours total.

Getting close to the magic number! At this rate, I should hit the 10,000 hour mark exactly 10 months from now -- so, mid-December of this year. Sweet!