Get a head start at University

Posted on 3 Jul 2009 at 11:00

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However, don't get carried away when choosing an MFP. If you're studying fine art or photography, you may need something expensive for scanning images (but even then, the university will provide professional-standard photo-scanners); otherwise, a relatively cheap device that can print and scan text crisply will do just fine.

If you're still feeling flush after buying all that, it's also worth buying the PC version of Encyclop?dia Britannica. This contains the same articles as the print version, but at only £19 it costs £726 less. Unlike its main rival, Microsoft Encarta, Britannica doesn't integrate multimedia and text into a single bundle, but that doesn't matter - the articles are generally a lot longer and more detailed than Encarta's. In some cases, they're detailed enough to be used as the main source for a first-year essay (not that we recommend writing essays from a single source).

Other necessities include a good security suite, which should include an anti-virus program. Before you buy this, check to see if your university provides one for free. You should also make sure that you have a good backup program, and that you make copies of your work regularly to an external hard disk. "My PC crashed, and I lost my work" is the modern equivalent of "The dog ate my homework" and tutors won't cut you much slack if that's your excuse for handing in late work. Look at What's New for external hard disk recommendations.

The internet may be the world's biggest library, but it's full of dross. The trick is finding what you want quickly and safely. Type the words 'origins second world war' into Google and you'll get over 11 million results. That's a lot of information, but how do you separate legitimate sources from rubbish? You don't want to cite an ill-informed amateur historian in your essay or, worse still, a Neo-Nazi group (unless you're writing about Neo-Nazism). Finding the right sources online and being able to tell a good source from an unreliable one are key skills for any student.

Normal search operators

The first place to go when looking for academic sources is the same place you'd look for everything. Search engines such as Google are often very good at finding authoritative sites, so see what a bog-standard search throws up. It would be galling to spend hours trawling specialist search engines only to find that the first entry in Google is the site you need.

If you can't find what you need with normal search techniques, you can try advanced search operators. These allow you to do things such as exclude terms from your search so, for example, for details about the Star Wars defence program but not the film, search for star wars -skywalker. You can also search for all the words in your search string, look for sites with your search string in the title, and so on. Google's help section has a list of advanced search operators.

As well as helping with general internet searches, advanced search techniques are also useful when searching academic databases. This is something lots of the university departments we spoke to cited as a key skill for their students.

Academic search engines

Once you've exhausted the possibilities of general search engines, you can move on to academic search sites. These sites range from those that are specific to one subject, such as gopubmed.org (medicine and life science) to general academic search engines such as www.oaister.org and www.base-search.net and, of course, http://scholar.google.co.uk.