Duncan Wither

Tools for University

Written: 29-Sept-2020

This it my way of managing notes and writing papers throughout university. Some/Most is engineering specific, but take what you want from it.

Note Taking

Handwriten Notes

I prefer handwritten notes. Found it easier to draw diagrams… and doodle.

Here’s my tips for this:

• Get some nice pens. I like Stabilo point 88 pens, in blue for notes, and black for exams. Get some that make you happy and don’t loose them.
• Get a nice notepad¹ (Moleskin or Rhodia etc.) that “brings you joy”², so you’ll look after it. This is for class notes.
• Also get an A4 legal pad if, like I did, you need somewhere to churn out exercises.

The point is to have a couple nice things so you take care of them and thus take care of whilst writing notes.

Keep the notepads for the year for reference, and take pictures of your A4 exercise sheets and then bin it. Pictures all go in a specific folder in case you need to refer to them.

Digital Notes

I didn’t take digital notes. Very important. But one way I might have tried digital notes would be markdown + pandoc.

I’ve discovered markdown late in the game, but wish i found it sooner. It’s trivially easy to write coherent notes, with easy enough formatting that quickly typable. The only weakness would be diagrams, but that’s always been my achilles heel with digital inputs.

Then to make them (even more pretty) use a simple pandoc command to convert them to PDF:

pandoc -s yourmarkdownfile.md -o output.pdf

Reports/Essays

Word

It has a good spellchecker and works fine.

I found it workable with the automatic referencing and its citation management, but it was still somewhat cumbersome. It also started to chugg and crash with big pieces of work. That’s why I recommend…

LaTeX

I only used it this final year, but wish I had before. It’s so much easier for citations, referencing, footnotes etc.

Also the mathematics formatting is unbeatable³.

Also also the IEEE (and often universities) put out TeX templates which work a treat.

Furthermore it separated the content from the editing, which I’d always strived to do in some part, but made so much more sense. The only downside is compile times (and errors), but it gives you a chance to grab a cup of tea, or notice mistakes to fix (followed by another compile, and mistake spot and so on).

I’d recommend using it for smaller reports too. Why? In order to get used to it and possibly develop a nice personal template.

Another small report alternative could be experimenting with markdown and pandoc, but I’ll leave that for the brave.

Zotero

Zotero (esp. with its web clipper) is essential for anyone doing lots of research, and allows easy exporting to .bib or to a formatted doc, so no matter what document processor you use, it’ll work a treat.

Was a total game changer for my research, thank you Laurence. Prior to it I just printed out papers, and kept the interesting ones in a phat stack⁴.

I also used the app PaperShip on my phone to read things on the move. It linked to Zotero well.

Collaborating

Google Docs. Basically the only option. Why? - Everyone has it / can get it easy. - Real-time concurrent editing is essential. - Easy commenting. - Idiot Proof⁵.

Just copy down references on the fly and organise them at the end. It’s a pain, but sites like citethisforme help unless you can get everyone on Zotero.

If you get some enthusiasm for collaborative LaTeX, give Overleaf a try (and use your free licence). I used it for my masters project and it was amazing.

Maths/Programming

Excel is pretty good for all basic (and some advanced) mathematics needs. It’s particularly for little things like grade tallies.

You’ll know if you need anything more like pyhton, matlab, ruby etc…

If you do need to learn to program, also learn how to use git⁶. It’s very useful version control, and a github account isn’t the worst thing to come up on a google search.