Good Reads

1. ✓Stephen Stearns, Some Modest Advice for Graduate Students
   

“The initiation-rite nature of the Ph.D. and it's power to convince you that your value as a person is being judged. No matter how hard you try, you won't be able to avoid this one. No one does.”

1. ✓Coursework Tips - Prepared by the Committee for Graduate Students (from AHA)
   

1. ✓The Thesis Whisperer - an online blog dedicated to helping research students.  A lot of “I totally relate” moments in there. 
   
   

2. ✓The Research Whisperer - a blog dedicated to the topic of doing research in academia.
   

1. ✓To Do: Dissertation - a blog created to offer supportive and encouraging suggestions for dissertation writers across disciplines.  The primary goal of the To Do: Dissertation blog is to talk realistically about practical steps that dissertation writers could take to finish their writing and take satisfaction and pride in their process and final product.
   

1. ✓gradhacker -  GradHacker is a collaborative blog and bootcamp program that spans universities and programs. It is written by graduate students from a variety of universities, departments, and stages in their careers and for the entire range of graduate and professional students. We are dedicated to creating a community of grads who can benefit from hearing the stories, tips, and challenges of others who are experiencing the same things. The topics that we will tackle are just as varied as the individuals who are writing them, and while the original idea for this spawned from the goal of teaching other grads about technology to ease their lives and help with networking, we want to expand the idea of ‘hacking’ to all aspects of grad life.
   
   

2. ✓Historying - I don’t read many blogs.  Who has time?  But I found Cameron Blevin’s blog very useful, especially his posts about quals. 
   

Software

I am a Machead, so I can’t tell you if my software selections play nice with Windows, nor can I tell you anything about Windows apps.  So sorry!  Be sure and check out academiPad for more academic technologies.

1. ✓Papers - my absolutely positively must have for organizing journal articles, ebooks, and my own papers.  Be sure and ask about student discounts. 
   

2. ★MacWorld Review
   

1. ✓Endnote - Rather expensive, but after playing around with several other citation management programs, I always go back to it.  The learning curve is pretty steep, but they offer quite a lot of free training both on their website and in real time virtual conference calls.  Saves hours of footnoting and formatting citations. 
   

2. ★MacWorld Review
   

1. ✓Scrivener - This is what I use for outlining all my readings and courses.  There is a template up there to the left ↖.  Scrivener is a powerful content-generation tool for writers designed for composing and structuring long and difficult documents. While it gives you complete control of the formatting, its focus is on getting you to the end of that awkward first draft. Compose your text in any order and in pieces as large or small as you like. View the components of your draft individually or as a whole. Import and refer to research files such as images and PDFs alongside your writing. Whether you prefer to outline first, hammer out your first draft and restructure later, or do a bit of both, Scrivener's corkboard and outliner tools are completely integrated with the text, so working with an overview of your draft is just a click away.
   

2. ★MacWorld Review
   

Mental Case - The Study App.  A suite of flashcard apps to help you study for anything.  Great for organizing and reviewing key facts.

1. ✓Notability - iPad, for taking notes in class, also annotates PDF files. 
   

1. ✓Evernote - I think everyone knows this one, but if you don’t check it out!  It is free and lets you capture just abut everything and access it from everywhere. 
   

1. ✓Yojimbo - Yojimbo is awesome for organizing little tidbits of information that usually end up strewn about your desktop.  I love the iTunes like interface.  You can add tags to all your collections making it easier to retrieve a quote or particular author.  Yojimbo has some drawbacks like the inability to delete built-in categories (the notes folder, for example, duplicates almost all the documents).  You can download a thirty day trial.
   

2. ★MacWorld Review
   

Resources

1. ✓Questia
   

2. ✓H-Net
   

3. ✓AHA
   

4. ✓Literature Review HQ
   

5. ✓Archives Wiki
   

6. ✓Teaching History
   

7. ✓AHA’a Directory of History Journals
   

8. ✓Ancestry - Yeah, I know it is genealogy, but it has come in rather handy for those historical biographies!
   

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