Tuesday, 11 April, 12-1pm
Room 302-180 (Computer Lab, new Science Centre)
University of Auckland
Despite being held during a busy time of year, just a few days before mid-semester break, several dozen students devoted an hour to learning about LaTeX, a typesetting program that helps users seamlessly integrate text, equations, graphs and figures. Utsav Patel, a physics undergraduate representing the Physics Association of the University of Auckland, facilitated the workshop, which was sponsored by CLeaR and its “Writing, writing everywhere” initiative.
Attendees showed up from a variety of disciplines for a variety of reasons. Some Chemistry graduate students were encouraged by their research advisers. Other students said they covered the basics in their computer science class but wanted to take advantage of an opportunity to learn about it from another perspective and enjoyed extra revision. A few students from physics said their handwriting tends to be messy, and so were looking for a more professional way to create reports. Most of the chairs were full and no one seemed exclusively lured by free pizza, which seemed like a good sign.
The workshop began with a few xkcd comics and a demonstration of the elegant versatility of the typesetting tool. Utsav showed samples of his physics lab reports and maths assignments. He showed examples of CVs and journal articles that were formatted with LaTeX, explaining why a striking document can create a good first impression.
After convincing his audience that LaTeX was an important skill, the attendees jumped right into practicing. Using Overleaf.com, students were able to start creating TeX documents right away, without downloading any of the packages and software. The workshop helped students realize: demonstrated what seems intimidating at first glance can easily be mastered with a bit of practice.