Speaker 1: Hello lovely YouTubes, my name is Chantel. Welcome to my channel and I have just spent the past three years completing my PhD and I just handed in my thesis. And so today I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the softwares or the apps that I use throughout my PhD because doing your PhD can be quite a difficult almost soul-destroying task. But there are a lot of softwares and apps out there that can make the process easier. So today I'm going to talk about a few softwares that I probably would not have been able to complete my PhD without. So the first bit of software you will need as a PhD student is some sort of reference manager. You will be writing up your thesis, you will be citing, you will be referencing, you will be reading, downloading hundreds and hundreds of different scientific papers. So you need a place in which to store these papers, read these papers and also a great thing about a reference manager is that it helps you with citations and references. Now there are a couple of different options out there. I think one of the most popular ones is EndNote, but this is a paid software. So there are some free alternatives one being Zotera, but the one that I use my personal favorite is Mendeley. I find it very intuitive, very easy to use. So this is the reference manager I have used throughout my postgraduate work. Now there are many advantages to using a reference manager. And the first is that it really is a place to just store your papers. As soon as you find a paper online, there are generally web plugins and you can download that paper directly to your reference manager. It will store it in the database, it will automatically input the correct title of the paper or the correct authors, etc. But the best part about a reference manager is when it comes to in-text citations and referencing. Because I know Mendeley, and I'm sure the other ones have it too, they have plugins for your whatever word processing software you're using, whether you're using Microsoft Word or whether you're using Latex. So as you are typing up your documents, you're writing a sentence, you want to cite what you have written, you simply just put in your unique code, which you have for each of the papers stored in your database. You put in the code and then it will automatically put in the in-text citation for you. And then right at the end, you can say build my reference list and it will automatically write out your reference list for you. So you don't have to do this by hand because that's just way too much of a waste of time. And you can also change the style of the references. If you need to use a Chicago or APA or Harvard like style, you can set your preferences for your reference style. So really, it is a very easy to use, brilliant tool, and you definitely need this as a PhD student. The next bit of software you will need is something in which to analyze your data. Especially if you are in the sciences, the major part of your PhD will be going out and collecting data and then you will need to analyze that data. Now again, there are a few different paid versions, something like Statistica or Primer, but these are generally quite expensive. And so the software that is sort of taking over the science world is something called R. And this is a free software to download. It's a free software to use and it is exceptionally powerful. It does have a bit of a steep learning curve because it is essentially a coding program. So you have to learn the coding language. You have to learn how it works. But you know what? I'm not a computer person. I'm not a coding person and I managed to teach myself how to do this. And I have spoken quite a lot about R in my previous videos, my frustrations, but really at the end of the day it is probably, in my opinion, the best software that you could possibly use. So it's really worthwhile learning it and coming to grips with it. And because it's so popular, there are so many online tutorials and forums that you can go to ask questions. So it's really easy to learn. So if you are needing to analyze data, I highly, highly recommend R. The third bit of software you'll need is something in which to actually write up your thesis, a typesetting software. Now, I think a lot of people would automatically assume that Microsoft Word is the way to go, but I have a great dislike for Microsoft Word. And not only that, if you are trying to type up a document that is more than 100 pages long, Microsoft Word will make your life incredibly difficult and frustrating. So the software that I use to write up my thesis is something called Latex. Again, it's coding software, so you have to put in your lines of code in amongst your text. So say, for example, you want to make a word italics, instead of just hitting the button like you do in Word, you just have to put in a line of code and that will turn your word italics. But really it just makes writing up a long document so much easier, because if you just need to change one little thing, so say for example, you need to change the font size for your entire document, all you need to do is just change the line of code at the top and it will change the whole document for you. It's really easy in terms of importing your pictures and your figures, because there are many different codes that you can use to place your figures in exactly the right place where you want it to go. And really, if you need to write up any long document, investigate Latex, learn how to use it and use it, because it is much, much better than Word. So as a PhD student, you want to be as productive as possible. You have a huge amount of work to get through and you want to get through it in as short a time as can be done. And there are two apps that I use throughout my PhD, which really increased my productivity levels. And the first is something called Forest. And this is an app that you have on your phone and I felt that it not only helped me to actually sit down and get my work done, but it also helped me to keep track of my work. So the idea behind this app on your phone is that you open up the app and you set a time limit, whether it be 15 minutes, half an hour, one hour, two hours. You can choose your time limit and you plant your tree. And as soon as you do that, your phone becomes locked. You can no longer use your phone. And then for that time period, you sit down and you actually do the work that you set out to do. And at the end of that time period, the tree will have grown on your phone and you can grow your forest throughout the day. So it's kind of works in conjunction with the Pomodoro technique if you are using that. So you do an intense amount of work for a set period of time and then you have a short break afterwards and it takes away the distraction of your phone. You can't use your phone. And then at the end of the day, you can look at how many trees you've planted and have managed to successfully grow. And you can see how much work you have accomplished throughout the day. Because, you know, especially when you're working from home as I was, it can be very easy to lose track of time as you go on. You get stuck in your emails, you get stuck in doing this and you don't get as much actual work done as you needed to. So this was a great way for me to keep track of the hours of real work that I was putting into my PhD. The next bit of software or app, you can either have it on your phone or on your computer, is Evernote. And this is very popular. I'm sure you've heard of it before. It's essentially just a note-taking software. But it's very flexible. You can input figures, you can draw on it, you can type, you can make lists, you can do whatever you need to do. And this is really great for a PhD student because your PhD is a very long endeavor. It's a minimum of three years. So you need to keep track of your thoughts as you go along because you might have a brilliant idea right in the beginning, but when it comes to writing up at the end, you will have completely forgotten about it. So as a PhD student, you need to make sure you have a note-taking system. You keep track of your ideas, keep track of your thoughts. And Evernote is really great because then you can search for the specific tags that you've put in and you can then find those thoughts as you need to. So the last but not least comes in on the more creative side. And as much as you would try to deny it, when you are a PhD student, you have to exhibit some levels of creativity. You have to make graphs, you have to make figures, you have to use pictures that you will use in presentations, use when you write up papers and use in your final thesis. Now, these images should be in vector format, which basically means that if you zoom into the picture, it won't pixelate. So for example, the PDF format is a vector image and I used something called Inkscape, which is a free software. It's not the best software out there. It's not really user-friendly. I found it a bit difficult to use, but hey, it's free and it gets the job done. And I used this to edit all of the figures and graphs that I put into the final version of my thesis. You know, every now and then you'll need to change a label or you'll need to change the colors or something. And I found Inkscape very useful to do this. So that's it from my side. Thank you so much for watching. If you are a prospective PhD student, I wish you all the best. I wish you the best of luck and I really hope that these softwares and these apps will help you in your journey throughout the writing of your PhD. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them down below as usual. If you enjoyed the video, please subscribe to my channel. And until next time, I hope you all have a happy and productive day.