One of the most valuable pieces of software that I have used in my undergraduate studies is LaTeX. Pronounced ‘lah-tech’, it is a program that can make all paper formatting and citations completely painless. Yes, entirely painless, no more reading the stupid citation manual and using random websites to make a bibliography. While some of this pain is alleviated by software like Zotero, having to change the citation style of a paper midway through without LaTeX is easily one of the worst tasks ever.
While there are already some majors on campus that will encounter LaTeX, such as physics, math, some computer science, some engineers and potentially chemistry and biology, there is much to be gained by all majors on campus by learning LaTeX. It is a skill that unlike Microsoft Word, once you learn it once, you know it forever. There of course is a high skill ceiling, but to be efficient in it requires roughly the same amount of learning as Word.
One of the great selling points is that LaTeX documents are typographically exquisite, due to the insistence of its creator, Professor Donald Knuth DSc ‘88 (Hon). Knuth designed TeX, the core of LaTeX, to be easy for anyone to learn and produce professional quality documents. For example, the default typeface, which was also created by Knuth, is very pleasant to read, and has a formal-ness to it that surpasses all contemporary competitors, specifically Times New Roman.
One of the other big advantages, or perhaps disadvantages depending on your perspective, is that LaTeX, by removing the need to care about formatting, allows the writer to focus specifically on the writing. In fact, it becomes an obligation to the writer to care more about the quality of their prose, since they now no longer have to care about the quality of the typesetting. It makes it easier to have thoughtful communication, since it breaks down the entire document into words. For the professors who care about the quality of their student’s writing, this should be a big selling point.
Imagine how much more useful CORE would be if you learned a tool that’s actually used in industry that can manage all of your citations and make writing any prose a breeze? This could also be used to help introduce more STEM concepts into the overall undergraduate population, while also being extremely useful.
So how do you use LaTeX? There are a few ways, but the easiest is through a website, overleaf.com, which has a free tier, and allows you to access your documents from anywhere, similar to Google Docs. For the more adventurous, you can also install it to your computer, since LaTeX runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. There are also countless tutorials on YouTube on how to get the most out of LaTeX and where to get started.
There is no doubt in my mind that LaTeX has easily saved me hours on every paper that I have written in undergrad, since I have not thought once about how my paper is going to look in the end. Hopefully it can save you even more time.
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