Tip #1: Technology Tips

Tip #1: Technology tips

Welcome to UW! You are receiving this tip- the first in a series- either because you work with me or because you have some interest in education and may work with me in the future. Feel free to opt out (let me know if you do not want this unsolicited advice) or forward as you see fit. These tips reflect things I wish someone had explicitly told me early in my graduate student career.
Five technology tips for you today.
1) You need this to get access to journals and other good stuff through the library when you are not on campus
2) Choose a citation manager now and start using it as soon as you write your first term paper. This will save you a tremendous amount of time in the long run. I started using EndNote my third or fourth year of grad school and now have about 3,300 entries, organized by keyword with abstracts and hyperlinks to articles. Happy to share that database with you if you like.
3) Choose an text editor and learn how to use it. I use a text editor (emacs) to write code for Stata. Emacs is probably not the best one anymore but it does what I need it too and I am not willing to incur the transition costs to learn a new editor. You can get guidance on what editor to use from SSCC or more senior grad students if you are not already using one. Again, learning how to do this now saves a tremendous amount of time later. Key features for me include recording keyboard macros to perform repetitive tasks and cutting and pasting columns of text.
4) If you do not yet use an electronic calendar now is a good time to start. I prefer google calendar. Others use outlook which is now the official UW calendar. As an added bonus, some very relevant calendars are available via google (Education seminar (ITP) by clicking the bottom right corner here and clicking on this ), Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) which will be available soon). I usually maintain a calendar for the Center for Demography and Ecology (CDE)as well.
5) Consider using a password manager. This is a secure way of storing passwords and will generate passwords for you if you like that are very difficult to crack (i.e. not your pet's name). I use lastpass but there are others.
Each of these things (at least 1-4) pays off like any other investment over the lifetime of use. The earlier you learn to use these things the greater the payoff.