Qinglong Diep
Connector Contributor
Students often find themselves cluttered in a mess when it comes to finding certain things on their laptop or even on cloud storage such as Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive.
The life of a student outside of the classroom is not the same for everyone. You are probably spending time in a library, a dorm or an off-campus apartment completing your assignments and turning them in on Blackboard. Sometimes finding course materials or a word document saved worked on your laptop or an online word processor such as Google Documents is like finding a needle in a haystack.
Tanner Hume, a sophomore history major says, “I would recommend having folders for each subject in either Google Drive/OneDrive, and always have your digital notes page ready before each class so that you may take notes.”
Whenever you are creating a document or uploading files to a cloud storage, it is best to name it something that you can find easily to avoid spending five minutes searching for it. When creating folders for each subject in cloud storage, the folder can be titled as the course name (e.g. Intro to Sociology) or the course prefix and the course number (e.g. SOCI 1010). While there is no preferable method of how you should title the folders for each subject, you should try it out and see which works best on finding homework assignments and course materials easier.
Within each of these subject folders, you are either creating a word processor document to complete course assignments or you are uploading course materials to it. At some point in time, you may have to scroll down to find it or you have to click on it or even download it to see what the file’s content is.
Even though naming word documents or files will make finding things easier, you may need to create a folder within a folder. In other words, you have a folder for a course, but at some point in time, there are too many things within it. You may need to create a new folder within that subject folder. When doing this, find something that a couple of the documents have in common and name the folder that. For example, if you have been taking lecture notes, you should create a folder within the subject folder titled “[insert course name] Lecture Notes” and move all lecture notes word documents into that folder.
Most email software allows you to create folders. Email is most often the best way to reach out to your professor. Sometimes when you are trying to find that one email from the professor, you have to scroll down to find it which can be time consuming. One way to organize your emails is to create folders.
In the web version of Microsoft Outlook, you can create a folder for certain emails. To create one, find “New Folder” on the left-hand side of the screen. A small box will appear. In the box, you enter what the folder’s name should be. When naming the folder, it should be what emails will be stored in this folder. If you are storing all of your advisor emails in there, name it “Advising”. Once you enter a name for the folder, press enter. If you want to rename a folder, you right click it and press “Rename folder” to enter a new name for the folder.
To move an email to a folder, click on the “Move to” button at the top of an email. From there, find the folder name you want to move the folder to.
Once the semester is over, you probably want to move all the subject folders you created for that semester into one folder that could follow this title template: “[insert semester] [insert year]”.
While the above tips are some of the ways to stay organized online, you’ve got to find your groove, or your own way to stay digitally organized, as some tips will work for others and some will not.
