Very good question. 1. Obviously the first step is to fulfil the course requirement: be able to read and type Chinese characters. You can feel good about being able to do this and not worry too much about handwriting characters. 2. The optional part of handwriting is a bit of a luxury. It depends on whether you have the time and the inclination. In an ideal world you should learn to do it, but nobody lives in an ideal world. One fun way of doing this is to use the copy book (幼儿书写描红练习本) used by Chinese nursery school pupils, available on the internet (http://www.taobao.com/product/%E5%B9%BC%E5%85%92%E6%9B%B8%E5%AF%AB%E6%8F%8F%E7%B4%85%E6%9C%AC.htm). You start with numbers (一二三四) and progress logically to 一人大太犬天夫。 Sounds good? It is the best way. One day, without noticing it, you will have achieved a native standard of handwriting competence. Good luck and enjoy!

I'm not familiar with Chinese, although I understand how Pinyin works. And I can also fluently read/write the Korean, Cyrillic (Russian), Greek and Katakana (Japanese) alphabets- in addition to speaking 5 languages. Anyway, I'm obviously not a Mandarin expert (lol), but after all my years of learning various languages and writing systems from Germanic, Romance, Slavic and Asian languages- I reeeeeally have to recommend that you practice writing Pinyin by hand as well. Skipping steps like that will ALWAYS become a huge handicap later on down the road during your language learning. Besides, writing the characters out by hand will only make it easier for you to remember them :) Good luck !