The 2017 Course Plan

It wouldn't be a new year without an overly ambitious and needlessly complex plan for various accomplishments and self-improvements. This year, I'm taking a slightly different approach. Some of the best advice I ever got, which I've basically never followed, came from some of my seniors during my short-lived and ill-fated tenure as a Naval ROTC midshipman. We were told that if we wanted to accomplish or improve upon something, we should treat it as if it was an actual course that we were getting credit for. So, for example, if you needed to improve your score on the physical fitness test, you could schedule three hours per week for running, or what have you. So, I'm going to try to follow that system this year. One of three things shall happen:

1) I'll accomplish everything, because I'll be so motivated and organized.
2) I'll basically accomplish none of it, because it's way too ambitious and complex.
3) I'll accomplish some of it, but gaff of on other stuff and basically not even touch it.

Option #3 is probably the most likely outcome, but hopefully I can at least use some organization to push myself closer to Option #1 than to Option #2. So, what's on the agenda? Well, let's start with the stuff that I want to accomplish.

1) Read a bunch of books for leisure: some familiar, and some new stuff;
2) pass the U.S. Navy Physical Readiness Test, or something comparable;
3) attain my PSP, Network+, and CISSP certifications, pursuant to my goal of moving home;
4) complete the manuscript for my book about the Orcadian Gordon Highlanders of the Great War;
5) get confirmed as a Roman Catholic prior to my upcoming wedding;
6) pass an Arabic language proficiency exam;
7) build HARDAC, and "authorize it" in accordance with the NIST Risk Management Framework;
8) complete an article on a topic relating to Middle Eastern security;
9) complete an article or two about the Dhofar Rebellion;
10) read some of the books on strategy that I didn't get around to reading during grad school;
11) complete a course of instruction, probably self-administered, in geospatial information systems (GIS), and complete some projects to that end; and
12) read some of the books I was supposed to have read for prior courses I've taken in Middle Eastern history, and complete a manuscript on the topic of Islamic law.

So, I've organized these objectives into twelve "courses", based on courses from the various institutions of higher learning that I've either attended, or considered attending.

01. ENG 199 General Literary Studies
02. PAC 130 Conditioning
03. BA 480 Information Systems Security
04. HST 406 Orcadian Gordon Highlanders of the Great War
05. REL 199 Introduction to Roman Catholicism
06. ARAB 101/102/103 First Year Arabic
07. CS 406 Projects in Information Technology Management
08. PI5502 Middle Eastern Security
09. HST 406 The Dhofar Rebellion
10. PI5001 Remedial Advanced Strategy
11. GIS/GEOG 151 Introduction to Open Source Geospatial Intelligence
12. HST 387/388 Remedial Islamic Civilization

One of the things about a class load like this is that you're not enrolled in twelve courses all at once. (Actually, if you figure that the leisure reading, physical exercise, and Arabic language stuff spans more than just one "quarter", it's actually a total of about twenty "courses".) So, I've put together a schedule in which I'll spend three months on each "class", and be "enrolled" in five of them per quarter.

I've put plans like this together in the past, and I've always found it difficult to motivate myself to actually execute them. Hopefully, 2017 will be different. I'll try to post more specifics as the year unfolds.