Services That Keep Me Sane in Grad School

These are my top-3 services I currently pay for or won’t mind paying for. Over the course of last few months, these services have helped me organize my life in grad school quite a lot. So, here we go!

1. Alice ( http://www.alice.com/ )

This has got to be one of the best grocery/general store I’ve discovered. Alice is an online store focused on getting all the daily necessities to you in timely manner. They also have a decent selection of snacks and pretty much all sorts non-perishable foods. Here are three reasons why I absolutely LOVE this service:

• Organize shopping list based on which “room” it is for. You get to filter products based on whether you’re looking something for kitchen, pantry, bathroom, bedroom, garage, etc. you get the point. Not only that, for each of the products you select, you get to pick a “frequency” at which you’d want to order it. If I’ll need toilet-paper roles every two months, I can set it up that way and I’ll get a reminder that it’s about time I got next batch of toilet paper rolls. They’re working on a system where Alice will automatically ship those things periodically, but for now you only get a reminder and you have to go and confirm the purchase.
• Get reviews from other people who have used it. This is helpful because as far as snacks, pen/pencil, dish washing soap, etc. go, I rarely try new products even though I want to do so more often. Reviews are especially helpful when picking coffee, tea, and toothpaste!
• Free shipping in less than 3 days! Yep, that’s right, quick free shipping. I’m in middle of Iowa right now, and every time I’ve ordered anything from them, I’ve gotten it before the end of 3rd day. In fact, it has even arrived in under 2 days some times. Pretty neat!

The prices are very comparable (and often cheaper than) local brick-and-mortar stores like Safeway, Hy-Vee or what-have-you. They have the same type of coupons you use in your local stores, and they are applied automatically so you don’t have to think about all that.

If you live in US, I highly recommend this service. Give it a try!

2. Mendeley ( http://www.mendeley.com/ )

Once you get into the full-on grad school / research mode, it is hard to keep track of all the research papers, articles, reviews, books, magazines, etc. you’ve read. Mendeley lets you organize all these documents, and it does so quite elegantly. Mendeley is pretty good at fetching the citation information from the web for a given document as well, so you save a ton of time filling out trivial citation information in a document. Here are two of my favorite features of Mendeley in addition to the core functionality of document organization:

• Web view is provided in addition to the desktop software. There are other document organization products out there, but none of them provide a Web access to the documents/citation info with organization mirroring the desktop application. All the folders and tags are preserved, and can be updated from the Web and/or desktop app.
• Create and share public lists. Mendeley lets users create list or collection of documents/sources and share with other users on Mendeley. This is quite a powerful feature if you end up working in a team on a certain research project. All the group members can collaborate on a shared list and stay up-to-date on the status of work progress.

Mendeley is currently a free service, but it is something I wouldn’t mind paying for. I’ve paid almost $40-$45 on a paid software (Papers) without most of these features. Also, it helps that Mendeley is cross-platform, so all your Windows/Mac/Linux colleagues are covered!

If you are a graduate student, or plan on being one, or you do your own research independently; I can’t recommend Mendeley highly enough. Use it! It’ll save you hours and hours of time.

3. Carbonite ( http://www.carbonite.com/ )

I can’t stress this enough: backup your data! If you are not backing up your data—onsite AND offsite—please PLEASE get that fixed soon. There is nothing worse than waking up one day just to see a dead hard drive or a stolen laptop/usb drive/whatever that had your homework, photos, music, research papers, presentation, etc. Here are the best $150 you’ll spend this year: (1) Get a 1TB external drive (approx. $90-$100) and (2) get a Carbonite subscription ($55/year, i.e. less than $5/month). External drive is your onsite backup, and Carbonite is an online (i.e. offsite) backup solution. There is no limit on how much data you can backup, so you can choose to backup everything on your hard drive, or just a few folders that you think are absolutely necessary. Carbonite has a tiny app that runs in the background, and when your internet is not being used, it’ll quietly do its thing and backup your data to Carbonite servers. If/When you suffer data loss, you can open the app and select which files you want to recover, and it’ll download them from the copy on its servers. Simple as that, and more useful than $4 you’d spend on Starbucks coffee (or bagel or whatever) multiple times a month.

If you’re not backing up your data, get Carbonite. I highly recommend it.

Honorable Mention: Hulu (especially Hulu Desktop )

OK, this one is tricky. Right now it’s free, but they obviously have plans to make it paid-only. I watch a lot of stuff on Hulu, in fact most of the shows I want to watch are available on Hulu. Seeing the convenience factor, I won’t mind paying for it given that the charge is basically the “convenience fee”. So, $5-$8 a month is acceptable, but $20 is not.

If you’re in US, and haven’t used Hulu yet, leave the stone age behind and get yourself a Hulu Desktop download.

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Alright, so that’s it! Those are the services I value quite a lot as a student. If you have comments, recommendations, love-letters you’d like to send me, I’m @divyamistry. Hit me up!