What docs to keep?

[sunshine6]

I have a filing cabinet chock full of my undergrad work... Papers, tests, notes, the whole deal. Haven't got rid of a single thing, and it has come in handy in the past. Thing is, I am moving, and need to lighten every load.

I know the first thing you will tell me is that this stuff is already on my hard drive, but that isn't the case. I take notes by hand (I know dinosaur tech) and my HD crashed early last year taking everything I did have saved with it. I know now to have a back up, or at least a web based email archive...

What would you keep? Notes on my exact sub-field? All papers or relevant papers only? What about books? Worth keeping?

I figured I'd post this here, as some of you are already familiar with this situation.

[fuzzylogician]

I've moved 7 times in the last two years (nr #8 coming up in less than 2 months) so you might say I have some experience with this. Here is what I've found: I did a double major in undergrad; first thing I did when I started my MA was get rid of all of the notes from my other major, except for some files of papers I got high grades on, for nostalgia's sake more than anything. The only exceptions were the notes from math and stats courses I took, which I thought might come in handy. They did. I also got rid of stacks of articles I had left from my linguistics major. I managed to get myself electronic copies of (almost) all of them and ditched the hard copies. I kept all of my books, but left most of them at my parents' house instead of lugging around them with me every time I moved. I kept all of my linguistics course notes from undergrad and am keeping my MA course notes as well, regardless of subfield. So far I've only had chance to use notes from my specific subfield, but I sleep better knowing I have a reference, in case I need it. Finally, I am keeping every assignment and exercise set I've ever solved, you never know when they might come in handy.

Hope this helps.

[sunshine6]

Thanks! That will narrow it down considerably!

[Michelley262003]

Ive moved four times (cross country- from midwest to west coast to midwest to west coast to midwest etc etc etc...) and will move again, this time to the east coast.

I have saved papers and projects that have been graded. All as electronic copies. I've saved a few final drafts of papers and ALL of my text books within my discipline.

Everything else, notes, tests etc. I've tossed right after undergrad graduation. Hasn't had any negative effect. Do it! Get rid of it all. It feels wonderful and it is so much easier to move.

[LingGrad2009]

I kept barely anything. Papers and summary sheets I made to prepare for final exams in important classes, NOTHING else. And the summary sheets and paper copies of the papers went into the can as soon as I got an acceptance to grad school. I move a lot too, and I constantly and strenuously reduce burden.

Something else you mentioned piqued my interest though: I don't think taking notes by hand is out of the ordinary at all. In most of my undergrad classes, the professors forbade laptops during class as a distraction (both for the students who might really be playing Snood and IMing and for the professors trying to teach over the racket of clicking keys), and if you wanted to tape record a lecture you'd have to ask permission and present a REALLY good reason for it first. Is this an atypical experience? I somehow only think of law students needing laptops in class as a regular thing.

[aginath]

I only kept electronic copies of docs. I've been out of school almost nine years and any books I had then are sorely outdated at this point.

[rising_star]

I moved tons of marked up, printed out articles across the country. I haven't looked at most of them since I moved, but will be needing them in the fall. If you have access to an industrial copier/scanner, you should totally put it to use. You can stick the papers in the tray on top and it pulls them through, scans them, and then you can email yourself the PDF. That's awesome, if you can.

Otherwise, keep things that are in your area of research and ditch everything else.

[synthla]

I kept pretty much everything from undergrad, which ended nearly a decade ago. I was aided and abetted in this by the fact that all of my moves until this point were employer-paid, so I had absolutely no incentive to trim down because it wasn't my dime or effort to get the stuff from point A to point B. That being said, a couple years ago I was doing some de-cluttering and came very close to ditching my old undergrad materials because I hadn't opened the boxes since I left college. Of course then I finally decided to go back to graduate school, and was never more thankful that I didn't follow through on something becuase without those boxes of documents, I would have had a much harder time putting together my application. And for purely sentimental reasons, it's nice to have the stuff - it's the kind of thing that your relatives will get a kick out of looking through someday and once you throw it away, it's gone forever.