Newcastle e-mail
All official correspondence about postgraduate studies will be to your Newcastle University student e-mail address. We can’t make exceptions to this rule. Your ePortfolio registration is tied to your student account, and the mails are sent directly to that account by the ePortfolio software.
We are aware that staff and honorary members often have a preferred personal or work account, and would rather not add another account to their e-mail clutter. You can use message forwarding if you want to read your email from a different account.
When you’re e-mailing the University about something important, do please use your Newcastle University e-mail address. Things can go astray; possibly spam filtered, we’ll never know. If you sent them from gmail or hotmail or whatever, there is no evidence that they were ever sent.
Library help
If you experience any difficulties you can seek help from the library via the medliaison@ncl.ac.uk email address. The library are also the source of wisdom on Endnote reference manager. An online tutorial on Endnote can be found at: http://libguides.ncl.ac.uk/endnote
Other good stuff
Here are three things I find very useful in making best use of Newcastle University I.T. facilities:
Thing 1: RAS
The Remote Application Service lets you use the University computing facilities from home. I find myself using the e-journals, but you can also run a lot of software over the link. It is occasionally useful to access websites from work that the NHS block.
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/itservice/software/ras/
Thing 2: Web folders
If you use RAS, it’s a nuisance transferring files back and forth. ‘WebFolders’ is a way to access your University account as if it was just a folder on your home computer. When you’ve set it up (once only), your University account appears in Windows Explorer like any other folder, and you can drag and drop just like normal.
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/itservice/filestore/remoteaccess/webfolders/
Thing 3: Personal software licenses
For a lot of software you can obtain a personal license through the University for the duration of your project. If nothing else, you should get a copy of your preferred statistical analysis package (SPSS, MINITAB, Prism, etc.)
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/itservice/software/licences/
IT support service
If you have any IT related problems, then please get in touch with the IT support services and put in a request. They will do their best to resolve it as soon as possible.