Getting organised in Academia 📚
Academia can be super stressful, but staying organised can make it less so! Here's a few things I found really helpful during my BSc and MSc
📚 Keep a diary, whether that's online or a paper diary or your phone! Having something to remind you of everything will help. Have reminder dates a few weeks before deadlines are due. Also make sure to schedule down time for yourself, and lunch breaks! These can be really easy to forget when you're in lab, or also working and busy. Having to hand all lectures, lab sessions, appointments, work shifts etc will help staying organised
📚 Benchling. Benchling is an online notebook that really helped me in my MSc. You can add protocols and attach them to your lab notes. You can also make lab groups with shared notes if you're working on the same project. I really liked being able to add images for annotation and well plate tables easily. It is free for those with an academic email address
📚 If you're writing up a thesis or an essay, create your graphs and figures on a PowerPoint presentation and then copy them over to Word. This will give you a bank of your figures and keeps them all in one place
📚 Labelling. Label all your work, the time, dates, concentration, image magnifications everything that you need to know for writing up! If you're taking photos for a project have dated folders with the images
📚 Researchgate. This is a really great free site for papers and to connect with researchers, to get on top of background reading
📚 Mendeley. If you hate referencing or struggle to keep on top of them then Mendeley could really help as it creates bibliographies for scholarly articles! I'd also really recommend not leaving all of your referencing til last, they can really build up!
📚 Be organised, but flexible. Sometimes experiments go wrong and that's ok and you'll have to be more flexible with your time. It might be helpful to have a bank of papers to read for when experiments go wrong and it's not possible to be in the lab