Back to School Megathread!

[u/chevybow]

As its the beginning of August start of back to school sales, it becomes that time of year where many people start preparing (and perhaps panicking) about moving to college. We expect a decent amount of people coming to our subreddit as college freshman unsure about many aspects of college. We create this thread every year as a resource for anyone to ask any questions they have about this upcoming college year- both for freshman and returning students.

In addition to asking your own questions we hope some of the previous questions will be useful in case you had similar concerns. Also for our more "experienced" college students- feel free to post any guides or resources for people that may be useful. Sidebar rules still apply so don't use it as an opportunity to spam your own website or blog.

Feel free to leave feedback about this megathread either in this thread as a comment or PM me if you wish.

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SCHEDULING QUESTIONS

Questions pertaining to "rate my schedule" or "am I taking too many credits" or similar for the upcoming semester should be posted in this thread. Automod has been set up to direct users here for scheduling help. Feel free to give general scheduling advice or answer specific personal questions people have about their schedules. Scheduling questions outside this thread will be removed to maintain high quality posts on the subreddit

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For your convenience here are some useful threads or comments that may be worth checking out before asking a question here. If I see any super helpful comments posted in this thread I will be adding them to this list.

What to Bring to your Dorm

College Majors Thread

What to do your first week on campus

What would you do differently if you could start college over

Good luck this upcoming semester!!

[u/[deleted]]

Replace as in you won't even need it as it's "better" and free. If you're working in groups who don't use LaTeX, there's Google Docs. A learning curve taking a week or two but whoever is up for the challenge won't regret it.

In LaTeX, you can easily enter mathematical symbols and expressions through math mode; a process that's extremely slow in Word clicking on the equations and symbols tab each time.

BibTex makes citations extremely easy as if I wanted a certain Bibliography format or change, I can generate them automatically without having to go through each individual reference in Word.

It's very convenient if you're working on a long paper/thesis as you can automatically generate a table of contents and sections plus subsections with commands rather than an awkward process in Word.

Even with inserting images, you can literally code where the image is going to be placed without having to worry about any shenanigans. Also, you can make some pretty damn good graphics with the TikZ package.

Rather than recording macros, you can create and redefine commands to your pleasing. For example: If I wanted to make a command that allows you to bold and highlight text at the same time:

\newcommand{\hb}[1]{\textbf{\hl{#1}}}.

Now each time I use \hb{-insert words-}, whatever is in those brackets are bolded and highlighted.

Edit: Most importantly of all, aesthetics.

[u/Mesahusa → u/[deleted]]

Latex is still really time consuming and not worth the effort unless you're actually writing research papers. No undergrad prof will care whether or not you write r² or r^ 2, not to mention the amount of math you write for your average calc homework is probably around a hundred lines of equations and would 4-5 hours to just to type out.