Don't be a putz, scan your notes

Recently I went on a week long field trip to Texas for a Basin Stratigraphy class. I took along my notes as well as some unrelated papers that I needed to read. By the end of the trip I had lost my notes and the papers.

One useful student-thing I got in the habit of doing my senior year at UC Santa Cruz was scanning my class notes. There was a color scanner on the office copy machine that would email me pdfs of my notes. Perfect. I could access my notes from anywhere (via DropBox) and if my notebook exploded, I had back ups.

I got out of the habit and am regretting it now. With my notes gone, I'm a bit stuck with nothing to reference back to.

So as a quick tip: SCAN YOUR NOTES. CLASS NOTES, THESIS NOTES, WHATEVER. Not only will you be able to access them anywhere, but you'll have a backup. Do it.

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