5 Essential Apps for Every PhD Student

hey it's Lucy I'm more qualified to make this video because I'm kind of a technophobe I tend to resist technological change and I tend to deny that there are programs out there that can make my life easier so stuff has to be really good before I start acknowledging that it exists over your many years in a PhD you are going to need some kind of organized system to help you keep track of all that stuff stuffed in your head and there is an overwhelming abundance of apps that will claim to do this so from a student who is only going to tolerate apps if they really do change my life for the better it absolutely nothing less here are 5 apps that I think are essential for every PhD student first one is Evernote Evernote is a free app for you to jot down anything and everything in a organized searchable logical format you can make notebooks to hold individual related notes for example I have this channel I have hiking lab work you can scan things in with the free Evernote app you can add tags to find things easier you can annotate images you can make checklists you can even add other users to certain notebooks and then share things back and forth much like you would on Google Drive an alternative is OneNote but I know nothing about that because it comes with Microsoft onedrive it looks pretty much the same though the reason this software is so inescapably useful to me is because it goes without saying by the end of your free or fall year-long PhD you're gonna forgotten a lot of what you knew at the start physical notebooks are great for when you just need some it quick to hand but what happens when you've got ten of them and you know there's inconceivably important reference in one of them or what happens when you can't interpret your handwriting anymore or if you lose one for all these reasons Evernote is the number one piece of software I'd recommend to any PhD student and that's whether your Mac or Windows science or arts organized an efficient or extremely slack like me number 2 is a reference manager high on my list of things not to do as an academic is to do what I did when writing up my Master's dissertation and that is to spend an entire day by hand copying references from Google Scholar into Microsoft Word like an animal how a reference manager works is I kind of think of it as iTunes but for papers so it manages your citations the metadata the PDFs the papers and most of them come with a web plugin that you can use to download papers directly from the likes of science direct you can insert your papers just like you've searched for a song in iTunes but the best bit is when it comes to writing up your own page there's a plug-in for your word processor you just type in the reference you want and it imports it but the best the best the best fit is it writes your bibliography for you I chose to use one called Zotero over competitors like Mandalay and EndNote because it seemed intuitive to me it was free and they're all pretty similar I'm honest though you do have to pay for EndNote it's worth mentioning if you do get something like EndNote on an institutions license and then move somewhere that doesn't have that license you'll either have to pay for it or you'll have to start from scratch and that didn't seem worth the risk to me everybody swears by a different one so you could always just try out several before committing so to save yourself time and dignity don't do what 22 year old Lucy did get yourself a reference manager number three on my list is some kind of vector imaging processor even if like me you're not remotely artistically inclined or talented by this I mean somewhere where you can draw lines and shapes that are PDF so you can zoom in and zoom in and zoom in forever and they won't go pixelated in contrast to bitmaps which are JPEGs for example using men on them and they call pixelated at some point whether you are presenting a paper or a presentation or just fencing off a door because there are nesting runs you're gonna need to make simple uncluttered graphics that will get your message across Adobe Illustrator is super powerful and effective but has a very steep learning curve and again not all institutions pay for its hefty subscription fees so if you have an institution that does and then you move you won't be able to access your files to me illustrator is a bit like buying a mansion and just living in one room I don't feel like I will ever use to its maximum that the capabilities and power that the software has and I was a bit lost and overwhelmed when I used in my masters free simpler alternatives include the likes of Inkscape but to be honest when you export PDS from Microsoft PowerPoint and Mac OS s keynote they're shockingly good I'm just gonna show you again that illustrator figure I made for my masters this took me an entire day learning how to make everything work and that getting everything drawn here is that same thing a redrawn in keynote and about half the time oh and better still when I came to give a presentation on this I just added custom animation and whoa it's just really powerful really intuitive really easy straight off the bat but if it's PowerPoint or illustrator that float your boat go for it just get a vector processor and use it well the fourth piece of software I recommend is a calendar of some sort whether this is max outlook the gmail want the iCloud one or the Mac calendar app as a PhD student you are going to have conferences to attend and seminars to attend and debates to attend our objective is to do and demonstrating activities you're going to be meeting with your supervisor you're going to be doing experiments you're gonna be going to conferences you're going to be getting on trains gonna be getting on planes you can have appointments that are gonna be mumps in advance that they're gonna change at the last minute you're gonna need to keep track of it all and you don't have a personal assistant so this is how the key to using a calendar is to use it religiously as soon as you make an appointment put it in as soon as the plan changes update it if something is really important or really far in future consider setting an alarm I check calendar several times every day I could have a physical diary but this is Meeta it's easy to remind me of stuff I can invite people to do certain things I can edit it easily I can easily check when I last did something by searching for it also calendars will sync across mobile devices which is very useful when you're on the go for all these reasons I strongly recommend you get a calendar app but don't bother if you've got a personal assistant my last recommendation will seem staggeringly obvious but here goes it's Microsoft Word I do not like Word I don't find it intuitive it's clunky it's slow it crashes on you you move one small image and the entire document just crumbles before your eyes but everybody has it you use pages like I do and it's kind of common courtesy to convert it to Word in case they don't have a Mac use latex and you need specialist knowledge to use it so sadly as much as it pains me to say word is the international language of word processes one thing I do prefer in word over pages is that it's track changes function it's really neat when you're passing an abstract back and forth of your supervisor this is a way to see what changes and comments they've made line by line everything from adding a semicolon to rewriting a whole paragraph in a comment that's the only compliment it's getting from me though and at least you won't have to pay for it because pretty much every institution has a license those are my top five maps of PhD students please tell me you think I've missed any tell me what apps you think have changed your life that I won't have heard of I come chat to me in the comments find me on Twitter and please subscribe for more PhD related content I'm Lucie Kazakh this is the pH Diaries and thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: Dr Lucy Kissick - The PhDiaries

Views: 418,207

Rating: 4.8846893 out of 5

Keywords: phd, phd life, postgraduate, postgrad, phd student, doctorate, doctoral student, phd problem, phd advice, evernote, microsoft word, vector image processor, calendar, zotero, endnote, mendeley, reference manager, onenote, software, apps, adobe illustrator, keynote, word processor, powerpoint, university, oxford, university of oxford, lucy kissick, dphil candidate, dphil student

Id: ktLPpGeP9ic

Length: 6min 38sec (398 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 25 2018