The Holy Grail(s) of Undergraduate Life

During my time at Warwick as a Liberal Arts student, I’ve learned what works for me and what doesn’t. So, I thought I’d share the websites/apps/programs which have been a great help to me over the past 3 years. Everyone will have different things which work for them, but these are my favourites and I hope they can help you too:

1. OneNote – I’ve mentioned previously that I do all of my notes digitally. For me, this makes the most sense if I’m writing my essays on a laptop too. It means I can copy and paste easily, search between pages and documents, and makes editing a lot easier. Not everyone likes to type their notes, and I know that writing out information is a great way to memorise it, but this is what has worked for me. OneNote is great because you can create “notebooks” online, within which you can have as many sections with as many pages and subpages as you need/want. I have one notebook for each year, one section per module, and then one page per week or per assessment for that module.
2. Zotero – Now, I only properly discovered this in my final year, and I honestly don’t know how I lived without it in first and second year… This is a software I’ve mentioned in a previous blog post too. It allows you to save citations into a library, which you can then easily export into your essay. For Liberal Arts, we generally use Chicago Manual of Style for referencing (footnotes/bibliography), so Zotero has made this process so much faster than typing it all out myself! You can create your own libraries/collections, I’ve done one per assessment so I have the sources specific to that essay all in one place. You can import citations through a Chrome extension, through Google Scholar, or you can put it in manually too. It links to Microsoft Word as well (not Microsoft Word online though, unfortunately).
3. Google Scholar – You should become familiar with this very soon into starting university, if not before, but if you haven’t started using it to research sources – do!! Hopefully we can all agree that Wikipedia is not the greatest source of information for an academic essay or assessment (unless you use the sources they have listed as their sources of information), so Google Scholar is the first place to go to find articles for essay sources.
4. UniMate – This is an app I have on my phone which I use to track my grades for each year and for my degree overall. It can take a bit of time to set up, but once you put in all the information, you’re good to go! How it works is it allows you to set the weighting of each of your years, input your modules and assessments, and set the weighting of each of these. So, if you have a 15 CAT module with 3 assessments that have different weightings, you can put these in to work out your overall grade for the module and how this contributes to your overall grade for the year and your degree classification. You have to put in the results for your assessments yourself, obviously. It saves time and can be a really helpful tool.

I hope you find some of these helpful in your uni work and, as always, if you have any questions at all, feel free to reach out 🙂