Reaching Lifelong Goals

I’m so excited!   I have just installed one of the best tools a Non Traditional Student could ever have – ENDNOTE – Bibliographies made easy.   This program is a must have for any serious research writing.   If you are a Non Traditional Student just getting started back in college, I whole heartedly recommend this program.   Go out and buy it today!!  Basically, Endnote  will allow you to SEARCH online bibliographic databases, ORGANIZE your references, images and downloaded PDF documents, and most important – CITE WHILE YOU WRITE!   I purchased the program Endnote 2.o, there are more updated versions available, but all will do everything you need when writing your research papers for college.  I am still in the learning curve…lots of features to master.   I did a cursory search of my probable thesis topic about WWI ace, Ernst Udet and was able to start locating some valuable resources.   And I have just scratched the surface of this program.   As an aside, I find that there has been very little written about Udet.   This is both a plus and minus for me.  One one hand, the available resources out there are few, but I don’t think my topic will have much competition out there.   I found just 17 references in the Library of Congress.   I will be digging into academic data bases when I get up to speed with Endnote.  One of the really fantastic features of this program is it’s integration with Office 2007.   Citation of references will be available with a single click, and the MLA foot note will be magically entered into the document I’m working on.   I’ll spend more time with the tutorials on Endnote and report my findings of the other spiffy features as I learn them.   If you are a Non Traditional Student that will be writing college level research papers over the next few years, this program is a definite must have.   I think there are a number of similar programs out there, but I had this one suggested to me by my History Professor.   He said if this program would have been available when he was writing his Thesis, life would have been sooooo much easier!!  I will update this post with more information about Endnote.  I will be diving into using it for my Non Traditional Student research paper for my WR123 class….Now that I mention this, I have a due date for my mid-term portfolio coming up soon.   Better climb that learning curve quickly!