Friday, March 21, 2008

Don't Print - Save $ and a tree


The thesis has been in control this past week. But NO MORE! I e-mailed that sucker 5 minutes ago and am free forever. Well ok, for a week until I need to do corrections. Still - it's something.

It is 112 pages at present. That's a pretty hefty document and old me would have printed it out 5 or 6 times to mark it all up and make corrections. I work better in hard copies. However, new me sucked it up and made edits on the screen. My advisor will be making corrections onscreen too, so hopefully the only actual copy I'll have to print will be the final version for binding.

How much money is this saving me? Well, I've burned through my allotted number of prints at school. Now they're 10 cents each. That's 11.20$ just for one draft alone, and I tend to print a lot of them.

I will try for the remainder of the semester to read articles for class onscreen as well. I can't guarantee this, because at some point my eyes may start to bleed. Still, if you figure I'll not be printing 200 pages each week for the rest of the semester, that's 1000 pages. That's 1/90th of an average-sized tree and less money spent on the stacks of articles swiftly taking over my apartment. Articles i'll probably never read again, I might add.

2 comments:

Dani said...

Congratulations on getting that thesis off your desk! I'm so envious. My own dissertation seems so very, very far away.

(Maybe I should spend less time reading blogs.)

LMsquaredG said...

You want to talk about saving paper? My mother now works in pharmaceutical publication, which basically means she proofs and edits drug proposals her company sends off to the FDA. Nowadays, everything is electronic, and the proposals are all submitted in a kind of Adobe software, with drop-down tabs that will give you all the info you need. But it used to be that a small truck(s) would come and pick up 3" binders full of paper--they would fill up the whole truck. I kid you not. Now that is progress.