Take Control of your University Life
A quick glance at your calendar is all it will take to remind you that the new semester is about to start. Yep, you'll soon be sat in seminars and lectures trying to avoid letting your mind wander at the exact point you're being told that all-important bit of information.
Fortunately there are apps that can make the entire experience of dealing with handouts, notes and bibliographies easier. And one of those – Evernote – might be just what you need for the new term.
Don’t miss anything
First things first: Creating a new note in Evernote is as easy as tapping on the big green plus. You can then type away, formatting on the fly to give your notes some structure, or highlight the most important bits of information.
But the real secret weapon for every lecture is Evernote’s built-in audio recorder. At the bottom of the screen you’ll find a small microphone icon to start a recording within your current note. While Evernote records, you can concentrate on taking your own notes (or doodling – hey – we're not here to judge) without the fear of missing something.
Reading your hand-writing
We are living in wonderful digital times, but that doesn't mean you're going to avoid being buried under a mound of paper as the term goes on.
Fortunately, Evernote can help you with this ever-growing pile. You can take a photo of a document, scan it or create a whole PDF that you can add to the appropriate note.
And if you’ve uploaded a suitable document showing printed, or often even handwritten text, it will be automatically analysed by Evernote’s optical character recognition (OCR) technology, to create a searchable version of your upload.
Find don’t search
You've embraced Evernote's features, but your next problem is making sure that this ever-growing collection of documents is easy to use.
To stay on top of everything you’ve heard and learned, Evernote gives you two very important tools: notebooks and tags.
Notebooks are the natural first step for a lot of people. You can create a notebook for anything – be it a topic or file – to keep things together. You can also combine multiple notebooks into a notebook stack to keep topics or classes linked up.
But, if you want to up your structure game, tags become hugely useful. A note can only ever exist in one notebook at a time, but you can attach multiple tags to each one. Just tap on the I symbol in the top right corner of a note and get tagging: dates, semester, field, topic, reader and so on.
Pretty soon, you'll be building your own easily navigable database of university information.
Evernote may be no guarantee for a successful semester but it will help you to stay on top of all things happening. And it will definitely have your back if the mind should begin to wander after all.