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Hey friends! Welcome to the second post in my back to (grad) school mini series! If you're new around here, I am currently a 3rd year PhD student and recently chatted y'all through why I use an iPad for grad school - but a question I'm often asked is what apps I use on my iPad so today I'm sharing the apps I use most often as a grad student.
My iPad Set-up
I use both an iPad and apple pencil and this combination has pretty much replaced any printed articles or paper notebooks I might've used in the past. My whole iPad setup is linked above but you definitely do not have to go as all out as I have - I talk about some more affordable options in my post on how I use my iPad for grad school!
Most of the apps I use for graduate school fall into three broad categories. (1) notetaking apps or apps I use for annotating books and journal articles, (2) to-do or planning apps and (3) file storage apps. Of all of these, the majority of my ipad time is spent using notetaking apps because graduate school is so much about reading and writing! In addition to the convenience of being able to keep all of my notes and plans in one convenient place, using an iPad to replace all the mountains of paper I would have used has huge environment-saving sustainability benefits as well. Alright, enough rambling, on to the apps!
Notability ($8.99)
Of all the apps on my iPad, I use notability the most by a landslide. I started using it at the beginning of my grad school career to download all of my readings so I could highlight, write, annotate etc all over the PDFs and not have to print out a mountain of paper every single week. Even though I'm no longer taking classes as a dissertator, I'm still reading tons of papers for my own research so notability is an app I use daily! Recently, I've also started using it to annotate my lecture slides during online lectures and sign documents for school or work.
Goodnotes ($7.99)
Goodnotes is the most common note-taking app pitted against Notability. It's common for students to either use Notability OR Goodnotes - but not necessarily both. I use both apps but for slightly different purposes. While they have many similar functions, Goodnotes' organization system is slightly different than Notability's in that everything is organized into notebooks. I have always been an avid notebook, planner, and journal user so I find Goodnotes is a much better replacement for that due to its notebook based organization system. I use Goodnotes primarily as a home for my digital planner where I use daily, weekly, and monthly spreads to plan out my teaching, research, and dissertation-related responsibilities. I am planning on doing a more in-depth blog post comparing the two apps so stay tuned for that!
Trello (Free)
Trello is a kanban board style productivity app that I've been using since I started college. If you've never used a kanban board style app before, it's a system that allows you to see all of your to-dos and projects on cards that are organized within lists that are organized within boards. That makes it sounds a bit complicated but it's really quite simple when you see it in use! I use Trello primarily to plan research projects and organize long-term task lists. There are so many things to keep track of in so many different areas of life that I often find it easiest to have a place where I can dump long-term to-dos into specific categories so I can organize it later. Trello serves that purpose for me.
Google Calendar (Free)
I use google calendar to track all of what I call my "butt in the chair" time. As a grad student, there are a lot of different roles and responsibilities you need to fill which means lots of places to be (during non-pandemic times of course). Rather than tracking all of my deadlines and meetings in the same place, I prefer to separate it out so that the places I need to be live in my google calendar while the things I need to do live in my digital planner. Google calendar syncs seamlessly with all of my other devices so it's an essential on my iPad
Google Drive (Free)
If you're a PhD student, some kind of automatically syncing cloud storage system is a MUST. There are literally a million files flying around at all times and you never know when you're going to need what! I use Google Drive to store all of my files and also back them up to a hard drive (when I remember to!). This means I have an extra copy of all of my files just in case anything goes wrong and I can access files from other computers if I ever need access and don't have my regular laptop with me.
SimpleMind (Free)
This app recommendation comes from one of the PhD students in my co-hort and it's honestly changed my research life! SimpleMind is an app that allows you to draw mind maps on your iPad to connect concepts, theories, research ideas - all of the above! Before using SimpleMind, I was actually drawing these kinds of mind webs by hand to figure out what my research interests really are and how they all connected with one another. With SimpleMind, I can do all of the same things I did by hand and now I can move things around and edit things, too - without having to redraw the whole dang map!
iMovie (Free)
This is a new one for me, but it's become a TOP app on my iPad this semester because of all the online teaching I'm doing! I've been recording online lectures all semester and iMovie has been a super easy way for me to edit my lecture videos.
YouTube (Free)
Admittedly, I don't always use YouTube for grad school purposes (read: lots of time spent watching YouTube for entertainment purposes!) but I often use it to learn new topics or watch videos on topics related to my research. There are lots of great statistics and teaching resources on YouTube that have saved me while trying to run a particularly nasty analysis or when I'm running into a tech snafu on my course website. It's become an invaluable resource for both entertainment and education 🙂
Hope y’all enjoyed my ramblings about iPad apps! I truly feel like having my iPad has made a world of difference in my graduate school career. It’s allowed me to be a whole lot more productivity and helps to keep all of my notes and plans all in the same place. Have you tried any of these iPad apps? Are there any other iPad apps you use for grad school that you think I should try?
