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Saturday, September 24, 2005
Graduate School Tip #38: Printing Stuff
I have learned a valuable lesson, but not the hard way. It was no news to me that I would be doing a large amount of reading in graduate school because a good part of training to be an archaeologist has to do with being acquainted with the enormous body of academic literature. This includes articles from academic journals and books that are available online through my friendly university library. The very first article I printed as a graduate student was about 50 pages and a few subsequent articles completely drained my first ink cartridge. Since ink is expensive and the free Dell ink jet that came with my laptop wasn’t “designed” for high-volume printing, I discovered the joys of online printing via FedEx-Kinko’s. The biggest benefit of printing through Kinko’s is that you don’t have to fight the on-campus computer lab crowds that consist of procrastinating undergraduates and clueless sorority girls who don’t know how to use a public printer (“um…I hit print, like, 30 times and it’s still not coming out”).
The tip is as follows: simply aggregate every journal article and printed document you know you will be reading over the course of the semester (sometimes a professor will do this for you and sell it in the bookstore as a reading packet). Use a full version of Adobe Acrobat to merge all of these files into one huge PDF file. Log on to the FedEx-Kinkos website, upload your document, and have it sent to your nearest store for pickup later that day. So far I’ve printed about 750 pages for the entire semester at a cost of under $50. I know I sound like a corporate bitch here but the FedEx-Kinkos thing really is great. I created my own account and will do all of my high-volume printing through them in the future. Thanks Kinko’s! [insert sparkling, plastic smile here]
Posted by Will at September 24, 2005 04:09 PM in Graduate School