Are you an expert?

In Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers he mentions in order to become a professional musician, athlete, or an expert at anything one needs about 10,000 hours of practice. Assuming, for example, that someone decided today that they wanted to be a professional skateboarder, they would need to be on a skateboard for eight hours a day, five days a week, and 50 weeks a year - for the next FIVE YEARS. Doing that calculation made me realize that I could have been pretty close to being an expert at almost anything if I had decided 5 or 10 years ago that I wanted to.

Beyond that, however, that piece of information drove home the fact that being in a PhD program gives a person an opportunity to reinvent himself or herself, emerging 4 or 5 years later as Dr. (insert name here), expert at (insert area of knowledge here).

The big question for the first year doctoral student is how to make take advantage of this opportunity without letting other things get in the way. Being a full time student shouldn't take much more time than having a full time job but it takes discipline to spend the required amount of time without a boss around the corner who can make sure that your work is being done. What makes being a student wonderful and dangerous at the same time is the freedom to determine almost every aspect of how will fulfill your academic requirements. You're required to go to class and go to the final exam - other than that, you have the entire day to either work on becoming an expert or do something else.

Beyond the first year things get even more wonderfully (and dangerously) free - no exams (except for comps at the end of the year) and problem sets. If you don't work on developing your craft, you could find yourself in a situation when you have to start thinking about a dissertation and look for a job.

I think that everyone should ask themselves whether they are an expert at/at/of something - if not, there's still time! All you need is 10,000 hours - that could be 8 hours a day for 5 years or four hours for 10 years. If you really want to take it slow you could spend 2 hours a day for 20 years and still become a professional. It may be worth a shot!