Here is the spark notes edition on the scheduling for OMSCS course cs6460, which is quite fast-paced and something I would like to imitate in the future.
Week 1-4
The first week, you got familiar with the overall landscape. The second week, you zoomed into a particular area of that landscape. The third week, you zoomed in further to a particular problem or question in that area. This week, focus on deciding what you want to do to contribute to the area of this problem or question. If you take the development track, what are you going to build? If you take the research track, what are you going to investigate? Either way, how will what you do contribute to this area? Continue to explore your area, with a focus on understanding the current state of the art and the open problems or questions to address.
Week 5
Why, though, should the community listen to you? This week, your focus is going to be on verifying your knowledge. How do you prove to the community that you have thoughts to which they should listen? This is about more than just having ideas; this is about connecting those ideas to the community’s current solutions or theories, explaining how it builds or improves on the current status quo, and demonstrating your ability to evaluate others' ideas in this area as well. You’ll need to continue doing some research this week, but your focus should be on depth rather than breadth.
Week 6
The proposal : This week, you’ll plan the rest of your semester. You’ve spent the last six weeks dedicating yourself to deeply understanding a certain corner of the educational technology landscape. This week, plan out how you will contribute. What problem are you solving (on the development track) or question are you answering (on the research track)? How will you go about accomplishing that goal? You’ll want to continue researching your area this week (and by now, you should have come to the realization that there is always more to read about your field), but your main emphasis this week is on planning the rest of your semester. Plan out the big goal, the week-by-week progress, and the intermediate milestones that you’ll use to get feedback from your classmates and mentor as you go along. Make sure to plan out contingency plans as well; if something goes wrong, you want to be able to course-correct.
Week 7-14
This period is for working on your actual project
Around week 10 is an important week as you will be halfway through! Now is a good time to revisit your original proposal and ensure that you’re maintaining the big picture view of the original project. It’s one thing to cross off the items on your to-do list, but it’s something else to make sure those items are fulfilling the original vision.
By week 12 you’ll want to start brainstorming what conference or journal might be most appropriate for your work. You may not want to actually submit a publication, but the final paper is practice for professional, polished writing about your work.