Communicating your research/work is an important part of science. Here is some helpful advice for writing a scientific paper and for giving a scientific talk.
Throughout your research career you will likely read hundreds or thousands of journal articles. Here are some tips to help you becoming a more effective reader.
Get a reference manager. Mendeley or Zotoro are great options and are freely available. Either of these programs will allow you to store, view, and organize all of your research articles. You can easily group papers by topic and assign tags/keywords to help you later locate relevant papers. These programs integrate with Word to allow for seamlessly citing references and automatic generation of bibliographies.
Back up your work. You don't want to lose all of your work in the event your computer gets lost or damaged. You should backup your computer prevent this from happening. You can easily backup your whole computer using Google Backup and Sync. Union students have free access to this service and unlimited storage.
A digital writing tablet is incredibly helpful for note taking and collaborating remotely. These tablets allow your to digitally store you anything you write/draw and are really useful for note taking (especially in classes where you are drawing diagrams and writing equations in addition to text). The Wacom Intuos is excellent and is available for $80.