Biology

Introduction to LaTeX!

No, not the rubbery plasticy stuff

LaTeX (pronounced “lay-tech”) is a free document-formatting system commonly used in STEM fields. This post is going to explain why it is really useful and where you can start!

So if you’re a STEM student, you’ve probably had to write a whole lot of lab reports and know how annoying it is to either figure out Word’s equation editor or screenshot a picture of whatever equation you’re trying to include in your report. Not to mention how awful Word is at formatting pictures, holding them in place and keeping things consistent. LaTeX solves most of those problems for you.

It works with some simple commands and packages that allow you to create journal-style articles, lab reports, and all sorts of other document types. You can include all sorts of mathematical and scientific symbols and equations and LaTeX formats them correctly for you. It might seem daunting at first, but most of the commands are very intuitive and you have a lot of easy customisation and consistent formatting. It can even do referencing for you. It has a lot of other cool things like generating a table of contents, automatically numbering your tables and figures, that contribute to producing a professional-looking scientific document.

All in all, the learning curve is very shallow, and the skill payoff is worth the small time investment it takes to learn. LaTeX typesetting is a very valuable skill to have in STEM.

Where to start:

There are dozens of downloadable LaTeX text editors, but I prefer to use an online one called Overleaf. It has several templates available for you to start from, provides shareable links, renders your document as you work, and, because it’s online, you can upload all your files to the server and work from anywhere.

I found the first chapter of this guice very helpful when I began using LaTeX  [x].

Some random tips I picked up so far:

1) Most problems/errors are easy to solve with a quick google search. Because LaTeX is so widely used, there are a LOT of stack exchange solutions to small problems. 

2) Manually creating LaTeX tables is a nightmare. It’s usually easiest to make them first in Excel, then copy-and-paste into an online LaTeX table generator.

3) Lots of journal articles have a pre-formatted bibtex citation linked somewhere. Using that citation works really well.

4) I like to open a text file, copy-and-paste all my bibtex formatted citations into it and convert it into a .bib file by renaming.

Some other useful links:

~LaTeX table generator [x]

~LaTeX reference generator [x]

~Find the LaTeX command for any symbol that you draw [x]

~List of mathematical symbols for LaTeX [x]

~LaTeX Stack Exchange [x]

I hope you find this helpful! If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to send me an ask or a message. Check out my study instagram if you’re keen on seeing some of my studyspo. Happy studying!

xx Munira

To all my freshman babies who are panicking right now about how much your college textbooks cost: Yeah, you’re right, that’s some highway robbery. No, you don’t have to lie down and take it. You have options. Follow my advice and fly on your own debt free wings.

1. Forgoe the bookstore entirely. Sometimes you can get a good deal on something, usually a rental, but it’s usually going to be considerably more expensive to go through official channels. Outsmart them, babies.

2. Does your syllabus call for edition eight? Get edition seven. Old editions are considered worthless in the buyback trades, so they sell for dirt cheap, no matter how new they are. It’s a gamble, sure; there might be something in edition eight you desperately need, but that never happened to me. However, I’ve only ever pulled this stunt for literature/mass comm/religious studies books, so I don’t know it would work in the sciences.

3. Thriftbooks.com, especially for nonfiction and fiction. Books are usually four or five dollars unless they’re really new, and shipping is 99 cents unless you buy over 10$ in books, in which case shipping is free. 

4. Bigwords.com. It will scan every textbook seller on the internet for the lowest price available, and will do the same to find the highest price when you try to sell your books back at the end of term. Timesaver, lifesaver.

5. In all probability, your library offers a service called interlibrary loan which is included in your tuition. This means if your library doesn’t carry a book you can order it for free from any library nationwide in your library’s network and it will be shipped to you in a number of days. Ask a librarian to show you how to search for materials at your library as well as though interlibrary loan; you’ll need to master this skill soon anyway.  If you get lucky you can just have your required reading shipped to you a week before you need to start reading, then renew vigorously until you no longer need to item. I’m saving over 100$ on a History of Islam class this way.

You professors might side-eye you for bringing an old edition or a library copy, but you just smile right back honey, because you can pay your rent and go clubbing this month. You came here to win. So go forth and slay.

10 Captivating Short Stories Everyone Should Read

1. The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell — The story of a big game hunter finding himself stranded on an island and becoming the hunted.

2. The Last Question by Isaac Asimov — A question is posed to a supercomputer that does not get answered until the end days of man.

3. The Last Answer by Isaac Asimov — A man passes away and has a conversation with the Voice in the afterlife.

4. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman — A collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of the house.

5. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson — The story of one small town’s ritual know only as “the lottery.”

6. Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway — A couple has a tension-filled conversation at a train station in Spain.

7. All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury — A group of schoolchildren live on Venus where the Sun is visible for only two hours every seven years.

8. Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut — It is the year 2081, and all Americans are equal in every possible way.

9. The Monkey by Stephen King — The story of a cymbal-banging monkey toy that controls the lives around it.

10. We Can Get Them For You Wholesale by Neil Gaiman — A man named Peter searches the phone book for an assassin to kill his unfaithful fiancée.

How to Take Notes: from a Textbook

(Be sure to change the post type from link to text post when you reblog, if that’s what you want to do)

This method is best suited for textbook or article notes, and is a version of revised notes. It is also well suited for books you plan on returning to the bookstore or books you have rented, as it does not involve writing directly in the book itself.

First, you’ll need to find a notebook, and the pens you like the best. My favorite notebooks to work with for note-taking, especially for my “revised” notes, are the Moleskine, hard or soft cover, in size extra large. For this specific class (Intro to Gender and Women’s Studies), I decided that lined pages would suit my needs better. For my math, engineering, and science classes, I usually opt for squared paper, as I draw in lots of diagrams and graphs.

My favorite pens ever are Staedtler Triplus Fineliners, so even though they show through the pages a little bit, I still choose to use them. I just love the way they write. I usually write out my notes themselves with a Pilot G2 05 with black ink, as it writes with a finer line and doesn’t bleed through quite as much.

I usually try to set up my notebooks about a week or so before class starts, that way it’s ready to go on my first day of class.

You’ll want to start off by setting up your notebook. On my first page, I put my course code for my university, as well as the course title.

Next, and this is perfectly optional (I just like the way it makes the book look, especially at the end of the semester), I include some sort of related quote to the course. For my engineering courses (which are related to my major), I put a different quote at the beginning of each section. But as this is a two-month long course during the summer, I opted for one quote by Mohadesa Najumi at the beginning of my book.

Next I set up my table of contents and include a page with basic course information. As this course is all online, my course information just included the start and end dates of the course, what time content is posted and on what day, and the name of my professor. For my usual courses, I will include the days of the week the class meets on and where, TA names and contact info, as well as posted office hours for my professors and TAs and tutoring hours either in the library or in the College of Engineering.

Next is one of the things I’m most proud of.

While I religiously use my Erin Condren planner to map out my days, weeks, and months, I have found throughout my college experience that including monthly views for the months my class ranges has been helpful. This way, there’s no sifting through the multiple colors I have in my planner, and everything related to that class is in the same notebook.

On this calendar I include start dates of the class, the end date, the dates of exams or quizzes, assignment deadlines, office hours, etc.

For this course, as I just started a few days ago, I don’t have a lot of dates or information, so my calendars are still very empty.

Next up I go to my weekly overview. At the beginning of each week, I set up a weekly layout, and I include a list of assignments, tests, quizzes, tasks, projects, etc that need my attention throughout the week, and I place the days I plan on doing them or the days they need turned in onto the weekly layout.

Now you’re finally ready to get into taking the notes.

Gather your book, some sticky notes, and your favorite pen or pencil.

I color code my stickies so that the “revision” process later goes a bit smoother. In this case, I’m using blue to denote something interesting, intriguing, or thought provoking, greenish-yellow to represent the facts or important concepts, and pink for important vocabulary words and their definitions.

Read the selection once.

As you read along the second time, write notes on your stickies, and place them in a place of relevance directly on the page in the book. Just make sure you don’t cover up anything you need to keep reading.

Now, once you’ve read all the material in questions (you can choose to break it up however you want, but since Chapter 1 was assigned for the week, I’ve elected to break it into chapters), carefully remove your stickies one by one and lay them out on a flat surface. This is when having a separate color for vocab can be helpful, as I sometimes put all of my vocab at the beginning or end of a section, especially if the section of reading was particularly large.

Organize your stickies in an order that makes sense to you, and use this order as your basis for transferring those notes into your notebook. The order you choose can just be lumping them under similar headings. Some classes even lend themselves to a nice chronological order. Whatever you choose, just make sure it’s something that will make sense to you when you come back to it in the end.

Okay so up there I wasn’t following my own advice, I just thought I would include the picture because my handwriting looks nice…

Now organize the stickies!

Now you just start writing everything from the stickies into your notebook. I like to take each category or subgroup and put them in the book on the facing page, then put them back in my textbook as I finish with each post it.

Moving on to the next category.

Before you know it, you’ve written all of your stickies into your notebooks.

Now you’re revved up and ready to go. You can either keep going and make a note summary page (which I’ll show you next week), or you can leave it. These will also be helpful when reviewing for tests and quizzes. You can highlight or underline, or use even more stickies (which is what I usually do) as you review.

Well, that’s all I have for you right now. Happy studying!

(To view this post on wordpress, click here)

This is what my revision wall looked like this time last year. So gutted I got rid of these note cards. I’m so dumb.

september 26th 2017 | 2/100 days of productivity

my quarterly exams are finally over!! woo^^ test scores come out tomorrow tho huhuhu i’m not sure how to feel about it but i think i did pretty decently! hope my grades are doing well :3

meanwhile, entrance exams are just around the corner… guess who hasnt started yet? yup that’s right! me lol 😂 tbh idk how y'all do it? share me your secrets!!

calling out any fellow procrastinators out there! wanna procrastinate together? 😂😂

what i’m currently in love with : breathe again by emily slough ( @emslough on wattpad!! she’s awesome i love her so much omg )

Setting some goals as i enter college ✨

Taken from my studygram: @equaticnss

general language learning resources

dictionaries:

wordreference - has spanish, french, italian, portuguese, catalan, german, swedish, dutch, russian, polish, romanian, czech, greek, turkish, chinese, japanese, korean, & arabic

reverso translation - has arabic, chinese, dutch, french, german, hebrew, italian, japanese, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, spanish & turkish

bab.la - has spanish, arabic, chinese, czech, danish, dutch, finnish, french, german, greek, hindi, hungarian, indonesian, italian, japanese, korean, norwegian, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, swedish, swahili, thai, turkish, vietnamese, & esperanto

digital dictionaries of south asia - has dictionaries for assamese, baluchi, bengali, divehi, hindi, kashmiri, khowar, lushai, malayalam, marathi, nepali, oriya, pali, panjabi, pashto, persian, prakrit, rajasthani, sanskrit, sindhi, sinhala, tamil, telugu & urdu

resources for learning words in context:

reverso context  - has arabic, chinese (in beta), dutch, french, german, hebrew, italian, japanese, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, spanish & turkish (in beta)

linguee - has german, spanish, portuguese, french, italian, russian, japanese, chinese, polish, dutch, swedish, danish, finnish, greek, czech, romanian, hungarian, slovak, bulgarian, slovene, lithuanian, latvian, maltese, & estonian

for learning different writing systems

omniglot - an encyclopedia with literally any language you could think of including ancient languages

scripts - an app for learning other writing systems with a limited amount for free (you can do 5 minutes a day for free) - has the ASL alphabet, Russian cyrillic, devanagari, Japanese kana, Chinese hanzi, & Korean hangul

Wikipedia is also helpful for learning different writing systems honestly!

pronunciation

forvo - a pronunciation dictionary with MANY languages (literally an underrated resource i use it all the time)

a really helpful video by luca lampariello with tips on how to get better pronunciation in any language

ipachart.com - an interactive chart with almost every sound!! literally such an amazing resource for learning the IPA (however does not include tones)

another interactive IPA chart (this one does have tones) 

language tutoring

italki - there’s many websites for language tutoring but i think italki has the most languages (i have a referral link & if you use it we can both get $10 toward tutoring lol) - they say they support 130 languages!

there’s also preply and verbling which are also good but there aren’t as many options for languages - preply has 27 and verbling has 43

(obviously these are not free but if you have the money i think tutoring is a great way to learn a language!)

getting corrections/input from native speakers

hellotalk - an app for language exchanges with native speakers & they also have functions where you can put up a piece of writing and ask for corrections - honestly this app is great

tandem - language exchange app but unlike hellotalk you can choose multiple languages (although i think hellotalk is a little bit better)

LangCorrect - supports 170 languages!

HiNative - supports 113 languages!

Lang-8 - supports 90 languages!

verb conjugation

verbix - supports a ton of languages

Reverso conjugation - only has english, french, spanish, german, italian, portuguese, hebrew russian, arabic, & japanese

apps

duolingo - obviously everybody knows about duolingo but i’m still going to put it here - i will say i think duolingo is a lot more useful for languages that use the latin alphabet than languages with another writing system however they do have a lot of languages and add more all the time - currently they have 19 languages but you can see what languages they’re going to add on the incubator

memrise - great for vocab! personally i prefer the app to the desktop website

drops - you can only do 5 minutes a day for free but i still recommend it because it’s fun and has 42 languages! 

LingoDeer - specifically geared towards asian languages - includes korean, japanese, chinese & vietnamese (as well as spanish, french, german, portuguese and russian), however only a limited amount is available for free

busuu - has arabic, chinese, french, german, italian, japanese, polish, portuguese, spanish, russian, spanish, & turkish, 

Mondly - has 33 languages including spanish, french, german, italian, russian, japanese, korean, chinese, turkish, arabic, persian, hebrew, portuguese (both brazilian & european), catalan, latin, dutch, swedish, norwegian, danish, finnish, latvian, lithuanian, greek, romanian, afrikaans, croatian, polish, bulgarian, czech, slovak, hungarian, ukrainian, vietnamese, hindi, bengali, urdu, indonesian, tagalog & thai

misc

a video by the polyglot Lýdia Machová about how different polyglots learn languages - this video is great especially if you don’t know where to start in terms of self study

LangFocus - a youtube channel of this guy who talks about different languages which is always a good place to start to understand how a specific language works also his videos are fun

Polyglot: How I Learn Languages by Kató Lomb - this book is great and available online completely for free! 

Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner (on pdfdrive) - another great book about language learning

Anki - a flashcard app (free on desktop for any system & free on android mobile - not free on ios mobile) that specifically uses spaced repetition to help you learn vocabulary, it’s got a slightly ugly design but it’s beloved by many language learners & is honestly so helpful

YouTube - literally utilize youtube it is so good.

Easy Languages - a youtube channel with several languages (basically they go around asking people on the street stuff so the language in the videos is really natural) & they also have breakaway channels for german, french, spanish, polish, italian, greek, turkish, russian, catalan & english

there’s also the LanguagePod101 youtube channels (e.g. FrenchPod101, JapanesePod101, HebrewPod101) which are super great for listening practice & language lessons as well as learning writing systems!

I really need to reduce my caffeine intake 😅

Taken from my studygram: @equaticnss ♡