College students are surrounded by the most powerful technology of the ages, yet some of the power and resources we have aren't used to their fullest abilities. Here are some great tips I've learned from working in Information Technology (aka IT) and trying to advance my productivity.
Take advantage of your school email address.
Your college email address is a powerful tool. You can get tons of deals on software that will increase your productivity. Many colleges offer free Microsoft Office with the submission of your email address. Students can also receive great deals on the Adobe Suite, a package of software that would normally make any college student go broke. Your email address also sends a message to future employers before they even open your email. Being involved in higher learning puts you a cut above the rest.
Don't address the email until the end.
We’ve all sent that one text prematurely where you sound like you didn’t know that sentences needed an ending. Imagine this on a larger scale with someone who you want to hire you. Nothing gives you that lovely, heart-dropping feeling quite like sending an unedited, incomplete email to someone who you want to want you on their team. Making sure your email is ready for sending before adding a recipient is a quick and easy way to save a lot of awkward apology emails.
Speaking of email, spend some time on a nice email signature.
All the professionals have one, that fancy email signature that says exactly what they do and how you can reach them. Keep these simple, yet informative. The goal is to get across your key positions and handles before people stop reading. If your email signature is a list of every club you're in and every position you’ve ever held, you not only will lose credibility, but someone looking at your signature wont know which position was your main focus and it will be difficult for them to figure out what kind of person you are.
Texting from your computer.
You iMac people have it easy, your phone and laptop text messages sync automatically, but for anyone who doesn’t live and breathe Apple, texting from your computer seems out of reach. Two great apps that I’ve used are MightyText and PushBullet. Both of these apps connect any number of computer devices to your phone so that you can text back and forth from your laptop through your phone. These apps can also forward any notification that would normally appear on your phone to your computer including that celebrity Twitter fight you’ve been following.
Learn some standard keyboard shortcuts.
Being a college student is all about balancing productivity and time. Learning some keyboard shortcuts for word processing or navigating the internet will help make you more fluid in your work flow and everyone looks cooler when they can type away like the hackers in the movies. Here are a few of my favorites:
Ctrl+Shift+T/Cmd+Shift+T while using google chrome. This handy shortcut reopens the last tab you closed and even works after you’ve closed and re-opened the Chrome app itself.
Depending on what version of Word or other word processing software you're using, there is a good chance there is a shortcut key for pasting text without formatting. This means that if you’re trying to paste in a source in your bibliography and can’t manage to remove that strange off-white rectangle around the text, this will save you the time of retyping it somewhere else.
Last but not least, bringing up task manager for all of you Windows folk. Although Ctrl+Alt+Del will bring up options to pick task manager from the menu, using Ctrl+Shift+Esc will open task manager directly.
Turn it off and back on.
Computers can be finicky, we all know this. If your computer is freezing, running slowly, or seems to have rearranged all your files without your permission, turn it off and back on. This allows the computer to start completely start over with a clean slate and will more often than not fix those minor inconveniences that slow you down.
Don’t use one password for everything!
(Looking at my girlfriend on this one)
Yes we’ve all been there. With modern password requirements needing a capital letter a number, a symbol, your first born child, and at least one word spelled backwards it can be difficult to remember as many passwords that we need in our lives. What do we do? We use the same password for everything. Why is this a bad idea? Hackers know that people use the same password for everything and although people protect their bank account password more carefully than their spam email account, if they can get the email password, they will try it on everything. If those passwords happen to be the same, you’ve compromised the security of all your sensitive information. The head of the NSA has said this is the main way civilians lose control of their accounts. If the pros know it, you should too.
The biggest download button is NEVER the right one.
Whether you're downloading T-Swift's discography, or some strange software to help you get through stats, you should know that the biggest, most green button screaming “DOWNLOAD” is absolutely the wrong button. So what about those really convincing ones? How do you know which one is actually the right one? On most websites when you hover over the download buttons a small URL will appear at the bottom left of the screen. Look at the URL and if it says what you're looking to download somewhere in that URL, you're probably in the clear, if not, it's probably a very clever fake button.
Clean out your downloads folder every now and then.
We all download a lot of stuff, study guides, music, funny cat gifs, but whatever it is, you probably won’t need it after a few months. Leaving all your downloads to collect dust will just take up space on your hard drive you could be using for important things, like dog gifs.
Backup your data!
It happens all the time, someone comes into work and says their computer won’t start and they think their hard drive is dead. I verify that it is dead and then ask the fateful question, "did you have a backup?" The answer is always no, and there is always some important paper or project that this person just lost. It isn’t only students either, just last month the head of the physics department lost all her lesson plans and exams she had just written without a backup. I recommend having at least one physical backup and another backup on the cloud or another wireless storage location. External hard drives are perfect for this but they can be pricey, a college students enemy. If you can splurge on a physical backup at the moment, send your most important project to a friend, or yourself. Having a copy in someone’s else’s hands could save you when you need it most.
