Software / apps I used as a PhD student

hello lovely youtubes my name is Chantel welcome to my channel and I have just spent the past three years completing my PhD and I just handed in my thesis and so today I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the softwares or the apps that I used throughout my PhD because doing your PhD can be quite a difficult almost soul-destroying task but there are a lot of softwares and apps out there that can make the process easier so today I'm going to talk about a few software's that I probably would not have been able to complete my PhD without so the first butt of software you will need as a PhD student is some sort of reference manager you will be writing up your thesis you will be citing you will be referencing you will be reading downloading hundreds and hundreds of different scientific papers so you need a place in which to store these papers read these papers and and also a great thing about a reference manager is that it helps you with citations and references now there are a couple of different options out there I think one of the most popular ones is EndNote but this is a paid software so there are some free alternatives one being Zotero but the one that I use my personal favorite is Mendeley I find a very intuitive very easy to use so this is the reference manager I have used throughout my postgraduate work now there are many advantages to using a reference manager and the first is that it really is a place to just store your papers as soon as you find a paper online there are generally web plug-ins and you can download that paper directly to your reference manager it will store it in the database it will automatically input the correct title of the paper or the correct authors etc but the best part about a reference manager is when it comes to in-text citations and referencing because I know Mendeley and I'm sure the other ones have a - they have plug-ins for your whatever word processing software you're using whether you're using Microsoft Word or whether you use in latex so as you are typing up your documents you're writing a sentence you want to cite what you have written and you simply just put in your unique code which you have for each of the paper stored in your database you put in the code and then it will automatically put in the in-text citation for you and then right at the end you can say build my reference list and it will automatically write out your reference list for you so you don't have to do this by hand because that's just way too much of a waste of time and you can also change the style of the references if you'd need to use a Chicago or an APA or a Harvard like style you can set your preferences for your reference style so really it is a very easy to use brilliant tool and you'll definitely need this as a PhD student the next bit of software you will need is something in which to analyze your data especially if you are in the sciences the major part of your PhD will be going out and collecting data and then you will need to analyze that data now again there are a few different paid versions something like statistical or primer but these are generally quite expensive and so the software that is sort of taking over the science world is something called are and this is a free software to download is a free software to use and it is exceptionally powerful it does have a bit of a steep learning curve because it is essentially a coding program so you have to learn the coding language you have to learn how it works but you know what I'm not a computer person I'm not a coding person and I managed to teach myself how to do this and I have spoken quite a lot about are in my previous videos my frustrations but really at the end of the day it is probably in my opinion the best software that you could possibly use so it's really worthwhile learning it and coming to grips with it and because it's so popular there are so many online tutorials and forums that you can go to ask questions so it's really easy to learn if you are needing to analyze data I highly highly recommend our the third bit of software you'll need is something in which to actually write up your thesis a typesetting software now I think a lot of people would automatically assume that Microsoft Word is the way to go but I have a great dislike for Microsoft Word and not only that if you are trying to type up a document that is more than 100 pages long Microsoft Word will make your life incredibly difficult and frustrating so the software that I use to write up my thesis is something called latex again it's coding software so you have to put in your lines of code in a monster text so say for example you want to make a word italics instead of just hitting the button like you do in Word you just have to put in a line a line of code and that will turn your word italics but really it just makes writing up a long documents so much easier because if you just need to change one little thing so say for example you need to change the font size for your entire document all you need to do is just change the line of code at the top and it will change the whole document for you it's really easy in terms of importing your pictures and your figures because there are many different codes that you can use to place your figures in exactly the right place where you want it to go and really if you need to write up any long document investigate latex learn how to use it and use it because it is much much better than word so as a PhD student you want to be as productive as possible you have a huge amount of work to get through anyone to get through it in a shorter time as can be done and there are two apps that I use throughout my PhD which really increased my productivity levels and the first is something called forests and this is an app that you have in your phone and I felt that it not only helped me to actually sit down and get my work done but it also helped me to keep track of my work so the idea behind this app on your phone is that you open up the app and you set a time limit whether it be 15 minutes half an hour 1 hour 2 hours you can choose your time limit and you plant your tree and as soon as you do that your phone becomes locked you can no longer use your phone and then for that time period you sit down and you actually do the work that you set out to do and at the end of that time period the tree will have grown on your phone and you can grow your forests throughout the day so it's kind of works in conjunction with the Pomodoro Technique if you are using that so you do an intense amount of work for a set period of time and then you have a short break afterwards and it takes away the distraction of your phone you can't use your phone and then at the end of the day you can look at how many trees you've planted and I've managed to successfully grown and you can see how much work you have accomplished throughout the day because you know especially when you're working from home as I was it can be very easy to lose track of time as you go on you get stuck in your emails you get stuck in doing this and you don't get as much actual work done as you needed to so this was a great way for me to keep track of the hours of real work that I was putting into my PhD the next bit of software or app you can either have it on your phone or on your computer is Evernote and this is very popular I'm sure you've heard of it before it's essentially just a note-taking software and but it's very flexible you can input figures you can draw on it you can type you can make lists you can do whatever you need to do and this is really great for a PhD student because your PhD is a very long endeavor three years so you need to keep track of your thoughts as you go along because you might have a brilliant idea right in the beginning but when it comes to writing up at the end you'll have completely forgotten about it so as a PhD students you need to make sure you have a note-taking system you keep track of your ideas keep track of your thoughts and Evernote is really great because then you can search for the specific tags that you've put in and you can then find those thoughts as you need to so the last but not least comes in on the more creative side and as much as you would try to deny it when you are PhD students you have to exhibit some levels of creativity you have to make graphs you have to make figures you have to use pictures that you will use in presentations use when you write a papers and use in your final thesis now these images should be in vector format which basically means that if you zoom into the picture it won't pixelate so for example the PDF format is a vector image and I used something called Inkscape which is a free software it's not the best software out there it's not really user-friendly I found a little bit difficult to use but hey it's free and it gets the job done and I used this to edit all of the figures and graphs that I put into the final version of my thesis you know every now and then you'll need to change your label or you'll need to change the colors or something and I found Inkscape very useful to do this so that's it from my side thank you so much for watching if you are a prospective PhD student I wish you all the best I wish you the best of luck and I really hope that these softwares and these apps will help you in your journey throughout the writing of your PhD if you have any questions or comments please leave them down below as usual if you enjoyed the video please subscribe to my channel and until next time I hope you all have a happy and productive day

Channel: Telly'sMarineTales

Views: 155,379

Rating: 4.9545794 out of 5

Keywords: phd life, life as a phd student, phd student, software for phd students, software for phd thesis writing, apps for phd students, apps for students, apps for productivity, study tips, phd, grad school, grad school tips

Id: FGZNiChcit0

Length: 9min 27sec (567 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 09 2018