How to create an (Academic) training course from hell?

[Reaper]

Hey! It's been a while since I've posted here. Anyways, I've been contemplating on how to create a "training" course, so to speak. It would be designed to help facilitate my learning of topics such as physics, as well as to become very proficient at them.

 

Much like the way people train for physical sport, but instead applied to the mind.

 

The reason I would consider it a "training course from hell" has largely to do with the fact that it is designed to be, well, hellish. Some ideas include:

 

-Doing 750 physics problems a week, in order of increasing difficulty. One wrong answer means that I would have to start over.

 

-Doing some complicated Boundary Value Problems in my head, and keep going until I can get the correct answer at least 90% of the time.

 

-Memorizing large amounts of information, such as thousands of digits of pi, or the names of every single country that has ever existed (past and present).

 

 

Anybody else have any ideas on how to create the perfect training course?

[vordhosbn]

Often people get frustrated, when they don't see immediate gratification from their efforts. It may be, or may be not the case with you, but don't you think it would be better if your "training routine" was a bit less hellish?

[Syntho-sis]

If you have the mental fortitude for this kind of exercise, by all means go for it.

 

Be sure to let us know about the results..

[darkenlighten]

If you can do 750 physics problem a week, I doubt you would need to be doing them. I mean for an upper level physics course, we were doing at max 8 a week. In my opinion, that does not seem anyway realistic or practical.

 

If you can do a physics problem in less than 5 minutes, it most likely wasn't worth doing, with that 750 at 5 minutes per problem on average is about 9 hours per day. Heck at 2 minutes per problem is still 3.6 hours a day every day, which is fine, but why waste your time with that easy of problems.

[Reaper]

Yeah, ok so I realized very quickly that 750 problems a week would be physically impossible to do. I thus scaled it down to a more reasonable number.

 

It will be more realistic goal, like 40 problems a week instead. This equates to about 6 problems per day on average. It will still be quite masochistic (at least at first, when it starts to become trivial I will seek out harder problems or increase the number of them), but at least it is possible and worthwhile.

 

I mean for an upper level physics course' date=' we were doing at max 8 a week.

[/quote']

 

Well, how much of your time was spent on them as a percentage of the day? Typically at higher levels I can average about 5 problems in about a couple of days (I will note that I did avoid putting them all off till the last day, otherwise I didn't get very much sleep...)

 

Of course, the very hardest problems took the most time by far.

Edited July 24, 2010 by Reaper

[CharonY]

Create and characterize 10 bacterial mutants in 4 weeks. Disciplines include

 

-Xtreme primer designing

-cut n ligate

-Massive electroporation

- 100m plating

 

And for the advanced: mutation stacking

 

The gold discipline is:

WTF does this mutation do?