Technological skills you need before commencing your academic journey
Students in the UK and around the world are preparing for their upcoming academic years. Those who have given up studying for work for a while, like the postgraduates, might feel a hint of anxiety upon commencing their studies again. There are several technological skills you might want to master upon your academia journey.
Making an automatically generated table of contents
A decent number of assignments might require you to create a table of contents, and it will be tedious and time-consuming doing it manually: you have to take notice of every page number and put thousands of dots, and one slight adjustment of the file can render your efforts null – you have to start all over again.
Microsoft Word’s automatic table of contents is super convenient tool that can help you do the trick. First, you need to set up your preferred heading styles. It is located at Home/Styles. The photo below is an example of APA-styled headings.
Right-click on the Heading you want to edit, click on ‘modify’ and adjust the settings according to your needs and references.
After you have finished setting up the headings, whenever you want to add in a new heading/title, refrain from using the Numbering – choose this Heading functionality instead. It will automatically link to the Table of Contents, which can be generated in seconds just by clicking References/Table of Contents.
Learning how to use a reference management app
A reference management app such as Mendeley can save you hours of editing. The guides on how to use Mendeley can be found here: Guides | Mendeley
Learning how to use SPSS, ANOVA and Nvivo
Of course it is just the matter of months before you commence your studies at Warwick and I guess you might not have enough time to study all of those. However, it would not hurt just to practice working on one of the three. Youtube is a treasure trove of clear-cut lectures on how to use those. If you are not even familiar with basic concepts of statistics, you may want to get yourself ready too – revising your knowledge about mean, mode, and standard deviation might help, and if you are an international student whose English is not your first language, you may want to learn lexical items about those too.
Familiarising yourself with MS Teams
At Warwick, MS Teams is the main means of online communication and learning, alongside Moodle and the holy Tabula. It works in a slightly different way compared to Zoom or Google Meet, so if you have never used it before, you may want to give it a try. Make a call to your friend and practice scheduling a meeting might help you get away with all of the initial technological fright when you start your actual course.
Using 2-step verification
The Warwick ITS system requires you to set up 2-step verification before logging in to any Warwick-related website. If you use the Warwick app, you will receive the codes from the app. However, things get tricky towards the end of your course when the Warwick app no longer processes codes. Therefore, it is important that you have an Authenticator app. I use Google Authenticator, which is a pretty straightforward and easy to use app. You can find it in any mobile app store.
