Taking notes and reading in graduate school?

Graduate School
1

<p>I recently started graduate school as a certificate student. I am attending classes full time this semester and although its only been a week since classes started, I am already starting to feel a disparity between my study habits in undergrad and the study habits required to keep up with grad school full time. This is my first semester handling heavy scholarly/journal article reading assignments (I had some brief assignments in undergrad that were similar but not nearly as dense or difficult). I am a psychology/cognitive sciences student right now. I graduated Summer 2012 from undergrad and I am intending to apply to a Ph.D. program this fall. I wanted to get a feel for grad school, clarify my goals, gain some further research experience and really take some time to reflect before I applied. </p>

<p>I've noticed not many of my peers handwrite their notes. In my classes there are not a lot of diagrams, most lectures are presentations of pp slides and two of my courses are seminar style, so it makes more sense to take notes on my computer. I was wondering if there's a really good program that helps keep digital notes organized? I've never really used my laptop to take notes in undergrad so I'm having a hard time transitioning. Also, almost all of my reading assignments are PDFs and I absolutely hate reading long articles on the computer. I've tried printing them out, which really works best for me, but its a huge waste of paper and not really that cost effective (I have about 3-5 reading assignments for each class every week) and a tiny inkjet printer. Any suggestions on how to organize and handle reading/note taking?</p>

2

<p>I’m not in grad school yet, but my last semester as an undergrad I tried digital note-taking. I found OneNote to be pretty easy to use and simple. Plus if you have Microsoft office already, it’s included so you don’t need to buy anything else. It also allows for copying images from powerpoints or websites to your notes a little better than just using a word processor. Plus you can organize it 3 different ways.</p>

<p>As for PDFs, they’re a pain. I’ve heard getting some of the newer eReaders, or a tablet, can help a lot.</p>

<p>Good luck!</p>

3

<p>See if your school has a double sided laser printer and print onto that.</p>

<p>I found for some classes that were heavily PP based I’d print 2-4 slides per page, single sided. Put the presentations into a 3-ring binder, then take notes for each page worth of slides on the previous page’s back. That way, when my binder was fully open, I’d see the slides (with small notes on them) plus more detailed notes on the other side.</p>

4

<p>OneNote is good for Windows users; for Mac users (and Windows users who don’t want to pay for OneNote), Evernote is an excellent note-taking and organizing app. If you have other devices you can sync your notes across smartphone and tablet, and can access them on other computers if you need to. It’s free!</p>

<p>As for PDFs, I use an iPad. Best investment ever. The app I use is GoodReader, but a grad student friend of mine showed me Notability, which seems both more robust and cheaper.</p>