Hey I'm Thomas I'm a third year Astrophysics student studying at the University of St
Andrews in Scotland and this is 2020. We're doing a lot of stuff online, so today I'm going to talk
a bit about what apps I use in my degree; because we do everything on computers now everything from
socialising to communicating to classes. So in today's video I'm going to talk about the apps
that I use and they're going to be split up into four different categories. First, I'm going to talk about
the apps that i use for organisation, to keep myself organized while at university. Then the ones I use
for communication since it's 2020 and we can't really just wander into the physics building and
ask for help or meet up with some friends then I'm going to talk about what apps I use for producing
different types of work because there are a few different types of things i have to do as an
astrophysics student and they require different things. And then there's just going to be a couple of apps
at the end that i just find useful they're not specifically study apps or anything they're just
very useful for me as a student. They help. So first organisation and
there's really only one app that really keeps me organised and that is Notion. Notion is a
productivity app and there are countless different videos across YouTube from a variety of creators
that use Notion. Off the top of my head the ones that come to mind of people that use notion; you've
got Simon Clark; you've got Ali Abdaal; you've got Sara Dietschy. I'll put a couple of videos
in the top right hand corner from Simon Clark and Ali Abdaal who can explain this far better
than I can in a short video. Notion kind of needs its own video because it's a very customisable
program. You essentially start with a blank slate and can fill it up with whatever you need to be
most productive. I've been using it since about April or May and it's gone through about seven or
eight different iterations at this point. It's hard to explain it succinctly because everyone uses it
in a different way. There's a couple other things i use for organisation. My university uses Microsoft
Teams which has a calendar function which flags up any meetings that I have but that's not so much
an app that I use specifically for organisation. So moving on to communication. Now communication
in 2020 is almost entirely electronic with the current coronavirus restrictions going up and
down and up and down all the time at the minute, you kind of have to rely on online communications.
Now there are a few that I use. I've already mentioned Microsoft Teams and it's the
platform of choice for St Andrews University. There are some universities who will use the various
like Google Classroom offerings, I think that does video, some people use Zoom there are options, but
my university uses Microsoft Teams because we have a lot of stuff with the Microsoft ecosystem.
Now most of my tutorials at the start of the year were on Teams because we still weren't allowed to have
any in-person teaching. Since about the third or fourth week of term we've had some in-person
teaching but one of my modules, transferable skills, we had our tutorials online the entire time.
It's different from Zoom, but some of the things it adds are really good and there are a couple things that
it misses out that I kind of wish it had. The video aspect is actually probably better on
Zoom but the organisation aspect of making sure people have meetings and invitations that come
through correctly and people come to them works far better in teams and you also sort of chat
functions, you can ask questions of a lecturer in the team for that module it's actually quite good.
Then there's email. We still use email a lot at university. Academia just kind of runs on it, and
it's fine. I personally just use the Windows 10 Mail app. There are many options.
People are probably judging me a lot right now for saying I use the Windows 10 Mail app. There are so
many different email applications. Basically I use email quite a lot for communicating
but not for messaging my friends. For messaging my friends, that's a combination of
Facebook Messenger and Discord. Discord is segregated to servers.
You can create your own servers and Facebook, it's your Facebook friends list. What more is there
to say? Okay, so having covered organiszation and communication, now let's talk about producing work.
Now there are a few different types of work I have to do as an astrophysicist. Obviously we have
lectures and I have to take notes for those. We have computational work. Some physicists will have
experimental work. Now I'm not going to talk about experimental stuff because I don't do
that anymore, but let's talk about note-taking now the way that I've taken notes has actually
varied quite a lot in the last three years. I started off taking notes on paper most people and
I wrote them pretty much everything the lecturer said everyone did in first year. But since then
i've improved a bit. I stopped using paper at the start of 2020. Not the start of this academic year,
last semester. I started taking notes on this, a tablet. Now the apps that I've used on the tablet
have changed. When I started off i was using Microsoft OneNote which is a fine program, just
at the time didn't have brilliant support for Android. Now since I don't use OneNote
any longer, although I might go back to it when I upgrade my tablet, I use Wacom's Bamboo
Paper app, and it's quite good. It's pen support is pretty good on android, and yeah.
My handwriting is terrible but I think that's largely due to the handwriting not being brilliant on
this tablet. I'm planning to upgrade to a Samsung which supposedly has far better handwriting
support. I did think about buying an iPad but it's an extra 100 pounds to get the pen whereas the
Samsung has it included. Everything else I have is Android or Windows. It doesn't make much sense for
me to buy into the Apple ecosystem. Now I've talked about Notion for organisation but
for some things I also use it for notes. On this channel I've talked a little bit about a module
called Transferable Skills for Physicists. Now Transferable Skills for Physicists is kind of a
here learn how to do presentations, and scientific writing, and kind of like learn how to function
in society is the way that I think about it. More than just what we do in our normal physics modules
which is learn the physics and answer problems on it and maybe do a couple of lab reports. Now for
this module I've had to write a review article on star formation around the galactic centre, as well
as giving a talk on the Cassini-Huygens mission to Titan. Both of these projects were quite broad and
involved a lot of scientific research looking through different papers and different other
sources, such as textbooks, and compiling all the information, and delivering it in a way
that is easy to read or listen to and engaging. And keeping track of all that data was kind of
difficult, so I kept track of that stuff in Notion, taking notes on it. But speaking of reports, this
is the other type of work that we have to do as astrophysics students. Now there are
a few different apps that I use for this. In fact, this is probably going to be the longest section
in terms of sheer number of apps. First, if I'm doing any sort of writing for a project,
submitting an article or that sort of thing, I will use a language called LaTeX. Now LaTeX was created
by the American Mathematical Society and it's essentially the way that all scientific papers,
largely speaking, are written. You write LaTeX in a program, and then use a compiler
to create the document, normally as a pdf. Now the program that I use is called Atom. Atom is
an editor that can do pretty much any programming language you want. Currently I use it for LaTeX but
I'm planning to set it up to use with Python and, assuming it works, maybe Fortran. I don't
know. I don't know enough about Fortran90 yet. We're doing a module in that next semester. What I
do currently use python in is something called a Jupyter notebook. It's something I'm not a massive
fan of but it's what we're made to use. I've just finished writing an astrophysics project
for Extragalactic Astronomy, like literally, literally an hour ago and, yeah it's a really
interesting way of writing. The code is segregated up into cells you can insert markdown cells that
are more text-based. I get why they make us use it for these things because you can submit it as
one file rather than your python code and a write up it makes it easier to mark but I would prefer
python code and a write up. Another editor I've used for Python is called Spyder.
It's something that works quite well. It doesn't take a lot of effort to set up. It's probably what
I would go to if I was needing to use something in a hurry and I hadn't set up Atom yet. Which I
haven't! Downloading papers from the internet, you get a lot of PDFs and there are two ways you can
look at them. First is to use a pdf viewer. I use either Adobe Acrobat or Nitro PDF. Normally Nitro
because it's free with my university to get the pro version. The other way that I deal with PDFs is
using a program called Mendeley. Now Mendeley is a PDF manager. Essentially you can import all of your
papers that you need to use and you can separate them out by the project that you're working on.
For example, like galactic center star formation. And one of the best things that this program does
is it integrates with something called BibTeX. It works with LaTeX to create your bibliography
without having to manually cite everything. It's brilliant and it will order them alphabetically,
or numerical order, or whatever style you need in LaTeX. Honestly saved me hours of work. But sometimes
I don't want to be using LaTeX and Python; I just need to write up something very quickly.
For that, I will use the Microsoft Office suite, like most people on the planet. Although there are
options. You can use LibreOffice if you're on linux, or I don't know, maybe there's a Windows version.
You can use Google's suite of things like Google Docs, Google Slides, or you can use whatever Apple's
one is. I don't know is it like pages and stuff? But what I use is the Microsoft Office suite, so Word
Powerpoint, Excel, and the other ones that I don't really use you're probably familiar with. These
programs, they just kind of work. Most people have something that can open a docx file or something.
It's fast, it's easy. You send them an email and it works. PowerPoint though is quite good it's
pretty much the best for doing presentations as far as i can tell. At least doing them quickly
and not having to deal with weird formatting it's like the only place we're formatting on Microsoft
seems to work. And that brings us finally on the producing work to handing in tutorial questions
and exam papers. Obviously this year, we're not having in-person exams and they don't really want
us handing in tutorial work because one person has COVID, they do some coughing while they're doing
the tutorial sheet, they hand it in, oh oops tutor got COVID. Not great. So what we've been doing is
electronic submission. Now my university, St Andrews, suggests we use a program called Office Lens. It's
a Microsoft program and it works fine, but I don't use it. Instead, I betray my St Andrews heritage and
use Oxford Campus Notebooks and they have these little icons and what that means is when you use
the Scribzee app, it finds those icons. And once it's found those it can scan it. And it just scans it in
and there's no adjusting the edges of your page to make them appear to be in the right place it
just kind of works. I can email it to myself and I just find it to be less hassle. Also it's really
nice paper to write on. It's like not too expensive. It's not the cheapest you can get but I quite like
writing on it and given I use fountain pens, it's nice to have slightly thicker paper so it doesn't
bleed through. And that brings us onto my sort of final section. It's very short. It's just the other
useful programs that I find help me as a student. First is OneDrive. Now I tend to use OneDrive or
Google Drive there are other options. Dropbox, that sort of thing. There are many available
cloud storage features. Now normally I would use USB sticks to transfer stuff, it's just a little
easier for me, but it is good to have a backup of important things like a project you just finished
working on. It's nice to have that online. And the final one is not really study related
at all but I use it almost all the time when I am studying and that's Spotify. I like music, it helps.
I think it helps. In fact I might put a link to my playlists in the description below, the ones I use
when I'm studying. So that's the apps that I use when I'm doing work for my astrophysics degree.
If there are some of these that you use and really like please let me know in the comments below. If
there are some that you think I should be using, put them in the comment section below as well. In
the meantime though, go and check out the videos on Notion from Simon Clark and Ali Abdaal. They'll
be in the top right hand corner, probably, and if you're looking for something else from me then
go and check out my video on why you shouldn't come to St Andrews University. In the meantime
though, please like, comment, subscribe, share this video, and I'll see you in the next one. See ya!