<p>Hey all, I'm currently an undergraduate studying neurobiology and I was wondering how grad students organized all of their class work, teaching, as well as research. From my understanding, it would appear that a paperless route/all digital approach would be best with all of the article reading and data collected with research. Being able to ctrl+f through your notes and journal articles seems like a huge advantage but I don't really like studying and reading a computer screen all day. So I was wondering how everyone organized themselves and keeps up with all the paper.</p>
<p>I think most grad students just stare at the computer all day long.</p>
<p>Lists. Lists. Lists. I do actually print out a lot of my readings so I can write notes on them. I just can’t read constantly on the screen.</p>
<p>Since I started grad school I have done different things. This is what has worked for me- as soon as i read a journal article, I take notes on it and upload it to labmeeting.com along with my notes. In this way, I can electronically search through the article and the notes I have made on it. For research, I keep an industry style notebook with each experiment being assigned lot number based on notebook number and page number. That way, any reagents I prepare get lot numbered and easily tracked eg. notebook 1001, page 5, clone 3 = 1001-5-3. This makes keeping all my tubes and constructs organized easy and I enter lot numbered tubes into sheets for each freezer box. For classes, I keep a notebook and manila folders 'nuff said</p>
<p>Holy crap that labmeeting thing looks rad and I might convert to it right now.</p>
<p>For classes I take notes the same way as I did in undergrad. Pencil and paper in a three ring binder. I try to collect all of my homeworks and solutions into manila folders, though I hardly wound up using them to study for candidacy (maybe if I some day teach a class and need inspiration for problems to assign…). I print out journal articles, highlighting important spots and writing brief bullet points at the top of each paper with what was important about it.</p>
<p>For TAing I’d try to keep the same schedule for when I’d have homeworks due and when I’d grade/hand stuff back.</p>
<p>For all my other misc things I like to write them up on the chalk board on my office or put post-its on my monitor.</p>
<p>I keep my paper PDFs organized with a program called Papers, which keeps them organized and searchable by title, author, full text, etc. It has saved my life on various occasions when I can remember that I have a paper about something, but can’t remember the title or who wrote it.</p>
<p>I also religiously schedule myself in iCal. If my calendars got deleted, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.</p>
<p>@belevitt: any chance I could get an invite to labmeeting?</p>
<p>pm me with your name and email address and I will send out invites.</p>