I was thinking on my drive home from work today about how a seemingly increasing number of students are coming to college without basic computer skills that I learned in high school. In the 1990s. I suspect the reasons are varied and multiple, but the number of students who come up through the K-12 system living in the Chromebook environment or just on their phones/tablets is part of it.
So what skills or computer knowledge would be useful to have before you head off to college?
- How to log into your own accounts: email, bank, your laptop if you have one, etc.: I have had to help a student figure out their own personal email address because their parent set up the account and the student had never had to log into it themselves before. A password manager can go a long way towards helping you here. (Just don't save the password for the email address that is the username for your password manager in the password manager - both because you need to be able to log into that account without it, and for account security.)
- Have unique passwords for any devices/accounts you use, or use a password manager: A password manager makes it easy to have unique, complex passwords for every account and is more portable than just saving the password in your browser. Unique passwords mean if an account gets compromised, you only have to change the password for that one account, and not every account you've reused the password for. 1Password and Bitwarden are both good.
- How to set up and use some form of two-factor authentication (2FA), and if it's still text messages, make sure it's set to a phone you have access to: Accounts tied to a parents' phone may still be usable if you can communicate with them in a timely manner, but for most purposes it is better to have it tied to your own phone. Google, Microsoft, and some password managers offer an authenticator app you can put on your phone and set up via QR codes for your accounts. Google's password manager can be set up on multiple devices, so if you have both a phone and a tablet with the app, you can use either to get codes.
- How to save both to a local drive (hard drive or USB drive) or the cloud: Knowing when to save where is also important. (On a library computer, save to your cloud account or a USB drive - anything saved on the computer's local hard drive is likely to be wiped when you log off.) This may require using the "save as" option in a program, or using the "choose somewhere else" option in the save dialog window.
- How to navigate the file system on a Windows or Mac computer and how to move files around to various folders: This will let you organize your documents, find things you've saved if you know what folder they're in, and see what you have if you need to delete things or move them to external storage to free up space. Computer drives save the individual bits of your files all over their physical media, not necessarily contiguously. (If you are familiar with the concept of "defragging," this was a process to let your hard drive reorganize itself to put data back together to speed up load times, because it was on physical platters actually spinning in the drive to read the data, compared to the newer solid state drives (SSDs)). The user interface organizes things into folders and subfolders irrespective of where something is saved on the drive, reminiscent of a bunch of file folders in a filing cabinet. This is why the icon in Windows to open the file navigator looks like a file folder. You can make use of the existing structure Windows gives you ("libraries" like Downloads, Documents, Pictures, Music, etc.) or create your own, as long as you can find your way back to it. You can create folders on your computer's desktop if it helps you to see things visually that way but don't want quite as much clutter.
- How to create folders and shortcuts: Windows 11 simplified the right-click menu and hid many functions in the "show more options" entry in the menu, but you can use shift+right click to see the full menu. You can use Copy (ctrl+c) and Paste Shortcut to create a link to a folder somewhere else (on your desktop, etc.) without having to move the folder. I use this for use cases like active projects that I want to have stored in the folder with other related projects but more quickly accessible via the desktop shortcuts. I also have a folder with shortcuts to all my active D&D games' notes folders or documents on the desktop. Creating folders can be done through the right-click menu or through the menu bar in the File Explorer app.
- How to search for files you've saved on a device: Because something (Word documents, downloaded files from the internet, etc.) always saves in a weird spot, and sometimes searching is the fastest way to find it. The File Explorer app has a search bar, and you can choose options like when it was saved and file type to help narrow down the results.
- How to update the operating system, software/apps, and firmware on your devices: This both keeps your features up to date and helps protect you from exploits in software bugs. Update your drivers! Update Windows! Update your browsers! If you want to be fancy, on a Windows computer, you can open a command prompt and use winget upgrade to see many of the programs that need updates. Most browsers can be updated through the Help > About option in their menus.
- Word processing functions in Microsoft Word: Margins, font size, page numbers, headers/footers, picture formatting and alt text, tables, centering, first-line and hanging indents, and title pages will get you through most of your assignments for classes. Unless you're at a college that uses Google campus apps, Word is going to be what most of your professors want things turned in as.
- Basic Excel formulas and graphs: You will likely find this useful for at least one class, but long-term, Excel and basic spreadsheet functions are great for doing personal budgeting. (If your college offers some kind of financial literacy/budgeting workshops, they're worth it! Get your retirement fund started as early as you can. Interest compounds!)
- Attaching files to an email: Most email applications use a paperclip symbol for attachments. This is another place knowing how to navigate your device's file structure can be helpful, whether it's your phone or your laptop.
- Connecting to WiFi: This is the one you're probably already familiar with, but if you're not, knowing how to navigate you're device's WiFi setup will be useful, especially if the dorms and other campus buildings aren't on the same system. You may need passwords or codes from your college's IT department for initial setup, just depending on their system. Some require you to register your devices.
- How to print: Printing is going to be a crapshoot at any institution you go to, so mostly know how to print preview, change which pages you're printing, change the number of PowerPoint slides printing per page, and print to PDF. Most browsers and word processing programs have a print to PDF/save to PDF/export to PDF option nowadays, either in the File menu or the print options. This can be useful for locking in your formatting, especially if you have an image-heavy Word document. (If you care about accessibility, PDFs are finicky, so that part isn't as great. PDFs are meant for printing.)
- How to turn on AutoSave in Word (it will save you when a squirrel takes out the electrical substation and the power goes out): The AutoSave slider at the top of the Word window wants to save to OneDrive by default, but you can change your options for saving on your personal computer in the File menu. Go to Options and select Save in the Word Options window, and you can select which folder things save in, if you want to save to your computer by default, and where your AutoRecover files go and how frequently they save data (in case your computer crashes).
- How to back up your files (to the cloud or an external device): Microsoft will nag you about setting up backups if you have OneDrive; you don't have to use their backups. But if there are files you would be distressed to lose (classwork, photos of your friends/family/pets, etc.), make sure you are regularly copying it to at least one additional location besides the device you've got it on. I back up all my documents to a USB drive, and my photos from my phone both get copied to my computer manually once a week and automatically backed up (at a lower resolution) to my Google account.
- How to forward one email account to another (if you don't want to regularly check your school email): You need to be seeing your school email, but if you don't want to be logging into the account, Microsoft email accounts (if your school has you using Outlook, that's this) and Google email accounts can be forwarded to the account you do look at regularly. The instructions change in details frequently enough that you're probably best off Googling the most current instructions.
- How to clear your cache, cookies, and/or browser history: This is mostly a troubleshooting skill nowadays, but if your browser gets weird, sometimes you just need to hard-reset a website by deleting the saved temporary files your computer has stashed somewhere. Browsers have a helpful search bar in their settings now, so you don't have to dig through their frequently changing menus to find these now. Just know that if you delete your cache, cookies, and/or history, you will need to log back into sites that you were logged into. Password managers make this easier.
These are the skills I most frequently see students missing that would make some of their day-to-day tasks for their classes easier to navigate, so if something on this list is unfamiliar, it may be wrth trying out until it's comfortable. Most of these skills will continue to be useful if you use computers for work.
