There are several reasons why so little attention is paid in college to the technology that gets you through day to day. One is that many academics themselves don’t really know much about computers. All but your youngest professors came of age when typewriters were still in common use, and have only barely mastered the fundamentals of computing, often in bits and drabs accumulated working on their own. Another reason is that there are so many programs, operating websites, and services that do the same thing that there are often no generic ways to do anything, and teachers fear that explaining how to do something in one program might hopelessly confuse students who use a different program. A third is that some professors are intimidated by the knowledge their students already have – many of you are so-called ‘digital natives”, with thumbs the size of oak branches that move at the speed of light over your cell phone keypads. It is often though, erroneously, that students have nothing to learn about technology from us old fogeys.

And yet… I’ve had to teach students how to attach documents to emails, how to format their margins, how to save in file formats other than their program’s defaults. While most software promises to make whatever it is a program is supposed to do easy and painless, all software comes with a learning curve. Most often, we quickly master the rudiments of a program’s functions and then ignore the other 80% of what the program does. Here’s an interesting fact: while planning the latest release of Office, Microsoft surveyed thousands of computer users about the functions they’d like to see in their office suite. Almost without exception, people wished for features that were already available — they just hadn’t figured out how to access them.

Take some time to get to know the software you use the most – especially your word processor, spreadsheet, email, and Internet browser. Go through all the pull-down menus and google anything that isn’t self-explanatory. “Mail merge”, for instance. “Pivot table”. Check the various file types available under the “Save As” menu (usually there’s a drop-down menu with all the formats you can save a document as). If possible, change the default file-type to a standard format like “MS Word .doc” for word processors – your professor will thank you when you email her a paper and opening it doesn’t produce pages of gibberish! Read a couple of reviews and a tutorial or two about your software – learn its strengths and weaknesses and some of its obscure functions. Check the import and export options, if there are any, and see what programs you can swap data with.

Unless computers hopelessly confuse you, you don’t need to take a class to learn how to use most software. But you should spend a few minutes here and there studying your programs – mastering the functions you use already and learning new ones. You may well discover new ways to do tasks that are otherwise painstakingly difficult, or ways to integrate programs that increase your productivity. In any case, you’ll become more and more comfortable with your tools, until using them becomes second-nature and you can spend your time figuring out the solutions to the world’s problems instead of the solutions to your formatting problems.

I’m always a little baffled vby students who tell me they throw out their old assignments at the end of the semester or, almost as often, as soon as they get them back. This shows a level of faith in the goodness of the universe that is far beyond my own capacities.

There are two reasons why you should hold onto your papers, your syllabus, and really just about everything a professor gives you. The first is practical: stuff happens. Professors forget to enter an assignment into their gradebook, they lose their bags, their cars are stolen, their computers meltdown. Your saved copies of your graded papers, syllabuses, and handouts are your proof that you did the work, that you did it according to the professor’s instructions, and that it was received by the professor. If you find at the end of the semester that your grade is lower than you’d expected, and the professor says it’s because s/he never got your term paper, and you can dig in your files and bring out the graded paper with the bright shiny “A” at the top, you can probably convince the professor to change the grade. If you feel that the professor graded you unfairly for some reason, you can go to the department with your work and request an outside review of your work. Essentially, your folder of saved material is your insurance policy, and it is always good to have insurance.

The second reason is intellectual: your papers are more than just an embarrassing record of naiveté and sophomoric thinking, they are a collection of quotes, bibliographic entries, a finely-tuned phrase here and there, and the occasional forceful argument. Most papers can be reworked into larger assignments when you find yourself in more advanced courses, whether in college or graduate school. In short, your papers are a treasure trove of mine-able material to draw on, likely under circumstances you haven’t anticipated. You’re trying to remember the name of the author of a book you read, or what the psychological principle is that applies to some situation, or whatever — dig out your old papers and have a look. Chances are, they’re both more embarrassing and less embarrassing than you remember.

I keep a small file box with all my student papers, from undergrad and grad school, as well as all my syllabuses and every handout. It doesn’t take much room, and it’s reassuring to know it’s there. I also have every paper I’ve written since I started using a computer in a “courses” folder on my PC. With hard drive space being cheap and plentiful — I have thumb drives with as much memory as my first desktop — there’s hardly ever any reason to delete files at all, so why not keep them?

I know it’s hard to imagine needing this stuff down the line, but the reality is, that’s why you should keep it. You may not need everything, but I can virtually guarantee you that you will, some day, want or need at least one paper you wrote in college — and that it will be the one you least expected to ever have to look at again.