The Next Term

Next week starts the new quarter in my MS in Clinical Informatics program.  Again I'll be taking two classes.  This time I'm going to be taking:

• Project Management
• Medical Decision Making

I've been doing project management for years.  I cannot find my copy of the PMBOK Guide, so now I have the Kindle edition, which will be more useful.  Some of my texts will be paper though, but hopefully not so much that it makes travel difficult.  I'm looking forward to that class, because while I'm not wholly self-taught, there's still plenty to learn and be refreshed on about managing projects.  I'll also be interested in seeing what is new in the field.

Medical Decision Making promises to be interesting because there's at least some degree of math involved. This class should also be a good lead into Evidence Based Medicine which I don't get to take for a while because of the course scheduling (I missed the chance last term, but was glad to just do two classes).

I did get my grades from the last term, and as Bill alluded to in this post, I did just fine.  Two A's.  One of the challenges I had with the last term was keeping up with this blog, since I was writing a 500 words or more a day for class.  I'll have to figure that piece out.

One of the things I remember from my last degree (an AA) was the challenge in scheduling everything so as to finish within a set period of time.  So I've got the next two years already planned out.  And of course, as soon as I do that, Bill writes this post discussing how he's working on curriculum changes.  So, I'll probably have to change my plans, which doesn't disappoint me at all.  After all, a plan is simply a framework that rarely survives the first engagement with reality (as I'm sure I'll be hearing about in my Project Management class).  The idea behind the plan is to know where you are headed so that when you come to an unexpected fork in the road, you know which direction is likely to lead you where you want to go.

Where am I going?  I'm not really sure, but my plan is to take an interesting journey, where ever it is.  So, my choices get to be a little bit different when I see a fork in the road.  Because I get to pick the path that looks the most interesting.  Oh, and just so you don't get confused, I expect it all to lead me right back to where I started, but with new tools and skills to apply to what I'm doing.