A STEM Student’s Guide to Essential Software and Online Resources
Speaking from experience as a cell biology student, the first year of higher education can be an enormous technical challenge that requires whole new ways of thinking and planning. There are a wide variety of articles focused on helping any new student to best prepare, and in this guide, we shall explore the current essential apps, programs, and resources, particularly for STEM students, that can help increase productivity beyond one’s peers and ease the transition from freshman to honor roll!
Note that these recommendations are my own and are in no way sponsored by any third-party. I have vetted every software tool and have consulted all online materials mentioned in this guide during my first 2 years at university. All of the recommended tools and resources are either free or freemium, meaning that more advanced features are hidden behind a paywall or a subscription.
Before The First Day
We must shortly discuss the devices you’ll need before stepping into the classroom. As a consequence of this year’s global pandemic, it is best to follow the requirements set out by your school’s IT department so that online learning is not impeded by your choice of devices. The following recommendations for essential hardware reflect both our online and offline needs during COVID-19 and throughout the remaining years of completing your degree:
- Computer: A laptop is best suited for the semi-nomadic college life. You can carry it with you wherever it is needed and can be adapted to fit a wide variety of preferences (plug in a monitor while studying at home, buy one with a touch screen if you prefer handwriting notes, etc.). Your choice of a more powerful processor (Intel i5/Ryzen 5 or above) along with a Solid State Drive (SSD) for storage can save you a lot of anxiety from slow performance issues. If your school does not mandate which operating system (Windows, macOS,…) must be included, then choose whichever you are most comfortable with, although you may need to find alternatives to some of the tools and resources mentioned in this guide that may not be available on the OS of you’re choosing. A tablet can also work well for those with less stringent demands, however, keep in mind you may not have as much functionality without additional accessories that already come included in laptops like a keyboard and more ports, and 2-in-1 laptops can usually offer the best of both worlds.
- Backup Drive: We’ll explore various cloud backup services in a moment, but no matter what, consider purchasing an external drive to keep your files in a physical storage medium. A Hard Disk Drive (HDD) is slow, yet is generally more reliable than an SSD for long-term archiving, and has a much better cost to storage ratio. A capacity of 128 GB or more should suffice, although you can purchase a smaller or larger drive depending on your course load.
- Spare Cables/Chargers: You can never be too safe when stocking up on spare equipment, especially in the midst of exam season when our electronics should just work and not get in our way.
- USB Thumbstick: In a pinch, transferring files over a small USB drive can save a lot of time. Never consider a USB as a long-term storage option, since flash storage can degrade over time (similar to SSDs).
Quality of Life Essentials
Every student should come prepared with a standard virtual toolkit:
- Office Suite: Whether you’re writing reports, creating scatterplots, or preparing group project slides, an office suite is a must-have for taking care of routine tasks in our daily lives. A subscription to Microsoft Office, one of the oldest and most popular options, is not free, however, it may be provided free of charge by your school. You can also access the online version of Office for free with a Microsoft account. Google Drive, which is in reference to both the cloud service and the office suite, is only available online, but it includes powerful collaboration tools and a revision history feature that can help rewind and edit files on the fly. Finally, LibreOffice is a truly free, no-frills, simple solution that just works.
- Cloud Storage: It’s great to be able to access our files conveniently from the Internet on almost any device. A Microsoft Office subscription includes OneDrive cloud storage access, whereas Google Drive cloud storage is central to the entire office suite. They are both very similar in terms of features and pricing, however one killer feature of the latter is that any files created in Google Drive using either the word (Docs), spreadsheet (Sheets) or presentation (Slides) programs do not count towards your storage quota, meaning you can store many more documents without worrying about space. If privacy is a concern, one workaround would be to encrypt your files before uploading them using services such as GnuPG, although this may come with some unique caveats like losing access to certain features.
- Note-taking: It is recommended to write your notes instead of typing them as it can help you to keep the brain more active and better understand the material. That being said, I need to type due to my bad handwriting and it is definitely more convenient to open and move files around. Choosing a note-taking editor can be one of the most frustrating challenges for any student. It needs to include just the right set of features that you will need while trying to follow the teacher’s lessons as well as include ways to easily access your notes when studying. Quite a few of us over at Biocord also enjoy the Notion editor for both note and task management (we’ve even written an article about it). I encourage you to experiment with as many note-taking tools as you can before settling on one that perfectly fits your workflow. Markdown deserves a special mention; It is a kind of programming language that is incredibly easy to use to create both structure and presentation in your documents and is integrated into many note-taking programs for faster typing.
- Memorization: Flashcards have proven to be a surprisingly effective method to memorize the material. Without a doubt, Anki is the right tool for the job. A favorite among medical students, it has an initial learning curve because of how unique it functions compared to its alternatives, yet it is worth it for its ease of use, healthy plugin environment, and companion website and app. If you prefer a simpler solution that’s easier to get started, Quizlet is also available, however, it does lack plugins and more features in general. Remember, practice makes perfect, so it’s important to keep up a regular routine in order not to forget!
- Agenda: In my opinion, nothing beats a true school agenda when it comes to managing your assignments and tasks. If you prefer a virtual to-do list manager, TickTick is my personal choice, as it is available almost anywhere and includes a plethora of features for customizing tasks. Again, Notion is also a viable option.
- Entertainment: It is always important to balance studies with relaxation and enjoying yourself. Each person has their own preferences, so instead, I’ll only recommend that you visit at least once the Internet Archive. Whenever you’re feeling bored, you have access to free movies, songs, and books online, as well as find links to other websites for even more free resources!
The Exciting Stuff
Now we can discuss some special tools and resources that are primarily aimed at students in the sciences:
- Online Learning Platforms: When you need more material to study whatever you’re learning in class, it’s almost always the case that it will be available online after a single search. Youtube includes so much educational content already that you can find a video on almost any topic. Of particular note is Khan Academy, which provides free videos and small quizzes for many courses that are prerequisites to more difficult college classes, think calculus, and organic chemistry. Resources for certain college classes taught at MIT are also published online through the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative. Many online classes are free to audit on the platforms Coursera and Edx that can help you pick up a new skill and pad your resume, and they also include paid multi-course specializations with certificates that can impress employers.
- Scientific Literature/Articles: It is always interesting to stay up to date on current studies and scientific breakthroughs, or to simply be able to research the Web for school projects. Researcher is a user-friendly article feed aggregator that includes the ability to save and bookmark articles as well as sync with citation managers. It is also hard to counter Google Scholar’s search engine when it comes to discovering specific articles.
- Citation Generator/Manager: The bane of every STEM student’s existence will be properly formatting your references for any paper that requires research. If you’re only looking for a quick citation generator, I cannot recommend EasyBib enough. You can add a website link, book name, article ISBN number, or other information and it can generate a citation in your preferred formatting style (MLA, APA,…). You can also create the citation manually by adding information about the source such as the author or date of publication. One neat tip is that Google Scholar already includes formatted references to each article that you find, so you can skip EasyBib and copy-paste the reference directly. When you need a citation manager for more complex documents, my personal favorite is Zotero. It is community-based, comes with plugin support, and can be integrated into many document editors. Alternatives include Mendeley or EndNote.
- Programming: Computer Science can indeed be daunting, take it from someone who dropped 3 programming classes in one session. That being said, learning even the basics of how to build your own little program is something almost everyone should do. From automating virtual chores to producing important data for your research, programming is becoming more and more of an integral skill that is slowly creeping into every STEM field as a necessity for scientific advancement (as a bonus, it opens up many more career opportunities). Python is an excellent beginner’s language; It is very simple to start and run your own scripts, it is easy to read and understand, and it includes a whole host of different plugins, called libraries, that make it highly extensible for your software needs. If your degree is more statistics-oriented or involves crunching a lot of data, the R language could be your best bet, which also includes a powerful companion application (RStudio) that makes learning and scripting much smoother.
- Typesetting: Word document programs like Google Docs and Microsoft Word can become a bit of a hindrance when trying to create specialized kinds of papers where you need to really fine-tune your document to match exact specifications. One of the best tools out there is what’s known as LaTeX. It is a very unique programming language that’s designed solely for document generation based on commands and macros, rather than editing text as it appears. I have used it thus far for all of my chemistry lab reports, and it is particularly popular with mathematics/physics students for quickly writing beautiful equations and theorems. It definitely is difficult to initially understand, but with enough practice, it eventually becomes second nature and handing in outstanding reports that go beyond those of your peers will definitely make you stand out. You can use a LaTeX editor like Overleaf (online) or Texstudio (local) to help you develop your documents.
We’ve only scratched the surface of available software and online resources that can help you fulfill your aspirations for a successful college experience. One final mention is to definitely check out which resources are provided by your school for all students. These may include partnerships with software or content providers so that students can gain free or less limited access to their services.
I’ll explore in greater depth certain programs and programming languages mentioned in this guide for future articles, so feel free to add a comment asking me to cover a particular application. Good luck and study hard!
