Saving Documents on the Computer

It's Finals Week at Indiana University right now, and sometimes professors are awesome (and yet, horrible) and tell you to write a long paper (or two) instead of putting you through a grueling test (that in the past, most people have failed).  It's good.

However, [as I have mentioned before, procrastinate WISELY] there are hard lessons to learn.

This may be common sense, but it is very important that you:

Save all your documents to a real folder.

If you don't know, most University computers' memories are wiped out every night. Sometimes you will find a file belonging to someone who has used the computer before you on the desktop. In my experience, you will have your personal storage space within the University's computer system (something like an H: drive), but if you save to the physical computer's harddrive, you can kiss that paper that you've been working on for thirty hours GOOD BYE. If you just save without making sure that you are saving it to the appropriate drive, you will be filled with frustration, searching-frantically-mania, sadness, anger, and frustration again (in this order) [ending in either a FAIL from a class, or a CHANCE AT A SECOND LIFE if your professor is kind and generous (this is rare, unless you are a small Asian girl)].

And if you want to be really smart, keep a soft copy of all your documents in your e-mail (in Gmail, you don't have to send it; you can just attach it to a draft which you delete later after all is done with that particular draft).