I did the Math…

Coming to Flatiron has been a crazy experience and it seems like the weeks are disappearing before my eyes. I think we all are struggling with the program because it is just so much, in every sense. First there’s the immense amount of information and knowledge that we are supposed to gain in such a short period of time. Then on top of that, the added pressure of essentially dropping our lives and committing to only one thing. And then on top of that, the uncertainty and unknown of jumping into a new career, and finding your place in that new world.

I thought it would be interesting to actually do the math and see, compared to a typical education, how extreme this process is:

Flatiron vs. Higher Education

15 weeks x 5 days x 9 hours = 675 hours of class time at Flatiron

15 weeks x 5 days x 1 hour = 75 hours of class time at a typical University (one course/semester)

675 hours / 75 hours = 9

Our in-class time at Flatiron is the equivalent of taking 9 five-credit courses in a semester.

If a typical semester recommends 15 credits, then we are essentially taking 45 credits in a semester.

Flatiron vs. Highschool

Let’s take our normal US public school system which is 36 weeks a year. A typical class meets one hour a day.

36 weeks x 5 days x 1 hours = 180 class hours

675 hours / 180 hours = 3.75

Our in-class time at Flatiron is the equivalent of almost four year-long courses in highschool.

Flatiron vs. A Marathon

Personally, It’s been an adjustment going from a very active job to being pretty much a potato all day long. I know we aren’t actually running marathons physically but we are running mental marathons everyday. The average marathon time is 4 hours and 30 minutes. We are fast though, so round down to 4 hours.

675 hours / 4 hours = ~169 theoretical mental marathons

We will have run 169 mental marathons by the end of Flatiron!

In the examples above I compared our time on campus only, but there’s also homework to consider.

Therefore the 675 hours is a conservative estimate., Let’s add another 2 hours a day to bring us up from 9 to 11 and then add 3 hours a day on the weekends.

15 weeks x 5 days x 11 hours + ( 6 hours a weekend x 15 weekends) = 915 hours

Granted not every moment is ass-in-seat and hands on keyboard, but you get the idea.

This definitely helps put in perspective why this is such an intense process for all of us. I’m sure many of us have never done anything like this so far and may never again. I think that this fully immersive process is very challenging and very rewarding at the same time. You are able to go from almost nothing to being semi-proficient in such a short period of time. And this makes sense when you break down the amount of hours. We are doing so much coding and if we weren’t getting any better, then there would be some serious problems. Malcolm Gladwell hypothesized that it takes 10,000 hours to be a master, and if we finish this course at 915 hours then we are practically a tenth of the way there! I feel like that may actually be true in other fields or areas but with programming it seems more like 1 million hours. In which case we are one thousandth of the way there!