One of the most important skills to succeed as an engineering student is good note taking skills.
A tablet (computer tablet to be clear) is a great way to take notes and keep your notes organized. There are many great note taking apps available on the Apple and Google app stores and even the default notes apps are very good. You are able to create as many folders as you wish, change the colors, and organize everything just as you like. Your notes also do not take up much space, so you can keep everything pretty much forever if you wanted to. Your notes will likely look better because of all the quick optimization and drawing features that are available through the note taking apps. Being able to scan and write on PDFs and images and insert them into your notes is also a very nice feature.
Why I Bought One
I bought a tablet because I like to write stuff down. Ideas, thoughts, notes on books I’m reading… and I was tired of using a single ‘catch all’ journal notebook for all these different topics. I tried a binder with tabs and dividers but even those are limiting. With the tablet, I love that all my notes are private, secure, and organized how I want so that I can easily go back and find something I wrote a while before. I never liked throwing away all my notebooks after each class ended but it just wasn’t feasible to keep all of them. Now, everything I write can stay with me for as long as I want.
One of my favorite things I use the tablet for is writing down any ideas I have such as projects or things I want to do in the future. THese are thoughts I definitely don’t want to lose and writing them on the tablet, I know for sure they are safe and secure, because no one else can unlock the tablet except for me.
Technology for writing on a screen is incredible. The latency is insane; you never see any lag. Auto shape drawing is an awesome feature as well making your drawings and notes look significantly neater and more legible.
Worth the Cost?
The tablet was right on the edge of being worth the cost. I’m an Android user so I got the Samsung Tab S7. It cost me around $500.00. Because I use it almost exclusively for notes, it is definitely overkill as it has a ton of other functionality that never gets used. There are an increasing number of tablets being made today that are specifically for note taking. These are typically much cheaper and likely offer an even better writing experience since writing is their main focus. I went with Android because I knew what I was getting and because I knew it’d be compatible with my phone, which is great when I want to quickly transfer files.
If I were doing it again, I likely would’ve gone with an Apple Ipad even though it wouldn’t have been as compatible with my phone. Many of my friends, also engineering majors, went the tablet route and opted for Apple Ipads. (Many of them also have all the other Apple products). The build quality between the Apple and Samsung tablets is very close, but Apple edges out on top in that category. It also seems to me that the apps available on Apple are just better overall with slightly better functionality. The only downside to Apple might be that storage cannot be expanded but I have yet to use the expandable storage on my tablet and am not anywhere close to needing to.
Conclusion
Ultimately, you need to be able to justify the purchase to yourself. Like I said, I’m a huge proponent of note taking and writing down thoughts and ideas. I also like to keep the things I write so that I can look back later. For me, this justified the purchase of my tablet. If those things aren’t a concern for you, then notebooks and binders can still certainly do the trick as they have been for thousands of years.
