E-mail eSign Form Mac

To add a new email in the Mail app on your Mac, first open the Mail app. Then, go to Mail > Add Account from the top menu. Select your email provider and follow the prompts to enter your information, then click 'Sign In' to complete the process.

Yes, you can seamlessly integrate airSlate SignNow with your email on a Mac. After learning how to add a new email in the mail app mac, you can utilize email functionalities to send and sign documents directly from your email client.

airSlate SignNow offers several pricing plans that cater to different business needs. While integrating your email after learning how to add a new email in the mail app mac is included, check our website for detailed pricing options.

airSlate SignNow provides essential features for email communication, including document tracking and templates. By understanding how to add a new email in the mail app mac, you enhance your email capabilities for sending signed documents efficiently.

Using airSlate SignNow alongside your email enhances document management and signing efficiency. After mastering how to add a new email in the mail app mac, your team can quickly send and receive important documents, improving workflow.

While having an email account on your Mac is beneficial, airSlate SignNow does allow you to send and eSign documents through its platform independently. However, learning how to add a new email in the mail app mac can streamline your document communications.

If you forget how to add a new email in the mail app mac, you can find helpful guides on Apple's support website. Alternatively, you can signNow out to your tech support team for assistance in accessing your email settings.

What are some of the websites/apps to enhance productivity and skillsets? Are you one that works too many hours? They probably don’t pay you by the hour, do they? More about results than time, right? Certainly all three are a yes answer for me. And I definitely like to find ways to reduce time on simple, mundane tasks. So my favorite productivity apps add a great deal to making my work life easier.I love to read, learn, and try new things. Like new apps for my smart phone and iPad. Often, I’ll see something that I want to try, save, and connect with other new apps I am using. Ideas that come from previously unconnected planes of thought, as Mootee states. There a...

Let me break it down for you, step by step:You will need a user interface. This can be created using HTML form. Accompanying CSS can be used to style the form elements. The form element must have input boxes and/or drop downs for the data you need to collect from the users when the sign up. Try to keep this minimal as too many input boxes might make the user annoyed and cause them to leave. You want them to sign up, don't you?The must have input fields are email id and password. Ypu must provide another field to "confirm" the password. Additionally you should also add a "Captcha" check to stop bots from automatically making bulk sign-ups. Google has a good Captcha solution which you can use. Besides that, there are other server side libraries for implementing captcha. I have also written my own using sessions, but finally I think Google's version is the best and even includes sound check.You must also validate the form when the user tries to submit it pressing a button called something like Sign up. This is where JavaScript springs into action and checks the inputs to see if the mandatory ones are filled in, the email format seems to be correct and the passwords entered in two fields are correct. If all is good you allow the form to be posted.Another thing I forgot to add is the a widget that can check the password strength. Again instead of writing this with JavaScript yourself, which is possible, you could try and find an existing script.Now the data leaves the client side and hits your server. The form would have a target script in your server where the data is "posted" to. This script needs to be one that processes the data posted and saves it in a database. It really depends on what technology platform you use but the process is more or less the same. I will assume you are using LAMP which is short for Linux (Server OS), Apache (Web server), MySql (Database) and PHP (Server side scripting language). The reason for this is just that I use it. But you might use any other platform. It's just that mine is better... no just kidding... :)So what the PHP script does as soon as it gets the data is it validates it. Yes, one should validate it again because sometimes JavaScript can be put off and unvalidated data might be posted. For example someone sends empty data for email and password and this gets inserted in the database. If your sign-in script is not written properly, a blank email and password might give anyone entry to the website!Once you are happy with the data (if not send back an error message), insert it into the database. In case of passwords, there are some good practices. It's generally not a good idea to store a password in plain text. You might want to turn it into a hash and also use something called a salt (string) to hash it many times over for security. It's beyond the scope of this answer to explain all about web security, but you can read all about it from various sources to aid you in implementation.The next step is to redirect the user to new page that says sign-up successful. An additional feature is to implement an email check. After saving the user's data in the database, indicate through a field in the datatabase that the user is suspended. Now let your script send an email to the user with a code that you can generate randomly while saving that code against that user in a separate database table.You have to code another script where the user will land following a link from their email which will match the input code (usually attached to the link as a query string - that is, after ? of the url) against the code saved against the user in the database. If they match, change the status of the user to current, open, etc. which basically should mean they can log in to the website.Sign-on form done, code the login form with just two fields. JavaScript validation should requite inputs for both fields. Once the user posts the username and password, use them to match against entries in the database. If a field matches, you send the user to logged in page, if not you send a error message which can be displayed in the login form page itself using AJAX.On logging in, you will need to use session variables to remember the user's credentials as she navigates from page to page.I have gone into some depth and I hope this will make sense to you as a programmer. However if you do not have experience in programming you will have to go by mine and other answers and learn the technologies first:HTML, CSS, JS, PHP/PYTHON/JSP/ROR/ASP, MYSQL .. etc.

The biography is a must buy for anyone that looks up to Musk. I've watched most of his interviews and a lot of things were new to me. Below are some takeaways and highlights I took in my Kindle. The trait that consistently comes up in Elon’s biography is perseverance. Suffering, though, has always been Musk’s thing. The kids at school tortured him. His father played brutal mind games. Musk then abused himself by working inhumane hours and forever pushing his businesses to the edge. The idea of work-life balance seems meaningless in this context. “He would call very insistently,” she (Justine Musk) said. “You always knew it was Elon because the phone would never stop ringing. The man does not take no for an answer. You can’t blow him off. I do think of him as the Terminator. He locks his gaze on to something and says, ‘It shall be mine.’ Bit by bit, he won me over.”For Gracias, the Tesla and SpaceX investor and Musk’s friend, the 2008 period told him everything he would ever need to know about Musk’s character. He saw a man who arrived in the United States with nothing, who had lost a child, who was being pilloried in the press by reporters and his ex-wife and who verged on having his life’s work destroyed. “He has the ability to work harder and endure more stress than anyone I’ve ever met,” Gracias said. “What he went through in 2008 would have broken anyone else. He didn’t just survive. He kept working and stayed focused.” That ability to stay focused in the midst of a crisis stands as one of Musk’s main advantages over other executives and competitors. “Most people who are under that sort of pressure fray,” Gracias said. “Their decisions go bad. Elon gets hyperrational. He’s still able to make very clear, long-term decisions. The harder it gets, the better he gets. Anyone who saw what he went through firsthand came away with more respect for the guy. I’ve just never seen anything like his ability to take pain.”“He looked like death itself,” Riley said. “I remember thinking this guy would have a heart attack and die. He seemed like a man on the brink.” In the middle of the night, Musk would have nightmares and yell out. “He was in physical pain,” Riley said. “He would climb on me and start screaming while still asleep.” The couple had to start borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars from Musk’s friend Skoll, and Riley’s parents offered to remortgage their house. Musk no longer flew his jet back and forth between Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. He took Southwest.One thing that Musk holds in the highest regard is resolve, and he respects people who continue on after being told no. Dozens of other journalists had asked him to help with a book before, but I’d been the only annoying asshole who continued on after Musk’s initial rejection, and he seemed to like that.He’s a product expert, and unlike most CEOs, wants to understand the engineering and design intricacies of everything. Tesla employees soon got to witness the same Musk that SpaceX employees had seen for years. When an issue like the Roadster’s faulty carbon-fiber body panels cropped up, Musk dealt with it directly. He flew to England in his jet to pick up some new manufacturing tools for the body panels and personally delivered them to a factory in France to ensure that the Roadster stayed on its production schedule. The days of people being ambiguous about the Roadster’s manufacturing costs were gone as well.Musk’s growth as a CEO and rocket expert occurred alongside SpaceX’s maturation as a company. At the start of the Falcon 1 journey, Musk was a forceful software executive trying to learn some basic things about a very different world. At Zip2 and PayPal, he felt comfortable standing up for his positions and directing teams of coders. At SpaceX, he had to pick things up on the job. Musk initially relied on textbooks to form the bulk of his rocketry knowledge. But as SpaceX hired one brilliant person after another, Musk realized he could tap into their stores of knowledge. He would trap an engineer in the SpaceX factory and set to work grilling him about a type of valve or specialized material. “I thought at first that he was challenging me to see if I knew my stuff,” said Kevin Brogan, one of the early engineers. “Then I realized he was trying to learn things. He would quiz you until he learned ninety percent of what you know.” People who have spent signNow time with Musk will attest to his abilities to absorb incredible quantities of information with near-flawless recall. It’s one of his most impressive and intimidating skills and seems to work just as well in the present day as it did when he was a child vacuuming books into his brain. After a couple of years running SpaceX, Musk had turned into an aerospace expert on a level that few technology CEOs ever approach in their respective fields. “He was teaching us about the value of time, and we were teaching him about rocketry,” Brogan said.Public image is very important to him. He likes to take credit for things and wants the world to know about it. If the media is wrong about something, he has no shame and corrects them. The engineering corps flew into a collective rage every time they caught Musk in the press claiming to have designed the Falcon rocket more or less by himself. Musk also hired a documentary crew to follow him around for a while. This audacious gesture really grated on the people toiling away in the SpaceX factory. They felt like Musk’s ego had gotten the best of him and that he was presenting SpaceX as the conqueror of the aerospace industry when the company had yet to launch successfully.Musk’s biggest detractors have made all of these arguments either in public or private and a half dozen or so of them said far worse things to me about his character and actions, describing Musk as unethical in business and vicious with his personal attacks. Almost universally, these people were unwilling to go on the record with their comments, claiming to be afraid Musk would pursue litigation against them or ruin their ability to do business. On the marketing front, Musk would run daily Google searches for news stories about Tesla. If he saw a bad story, he ordered someone to “fix it” even though the Tesla public relations people could do little to sway the reporters.Expectations at Tesla SpaceX are incredibly high and new employees are told that from the start. When Musk sets unrealistic goals, verbally abuses employees, and works them to the bone, it’s understood to be—on some level—part of the Mars agenda. Some employees love him for this. Others loathe him but remain oddly loyal out of respect for his drive and mission. What Musk has developed that so many of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack is a meaningful worldview.When Musk came into the meeting room where I’d been waiting, I noted how impressive it was for so many people to turn up on a Saturday. Musk saw the situation in a different light, complaining that fewer and fewer people had been working weekends of late. “We’ve grown fucking soft,” Musk replied. “I was just going to send out an e-mail. We’re fucking soft.”Another salesman flew down to SpaceX to sell the company on some technology infrastructure equipment. He was doing the standard relationship-building exercise practiced by salespeople for centuries. Show up. Speak for a while. Feel each other out. Then, start doing business down the road. Musk was having none of it. “The guy comes in, and Elon asks him why they’re meeting,” Spikes said. “He said, ‘To develop a relationship.’ Elon replied, ‘Okay. Nice to meet you,’ which basically meant, ‘Get the fuck out of my office.’ This guy had spent four hours traveling for what ended up as a two-minute meeting. Elon just has no tolerance for that kind of stuff.” Musk could be equally brisk with employees who were not hitting his standards. “He would often say, ‘The longer you wait to fire someone the longer it has been since you should have fired them,’” Spikes said.“We’d have these meetings and take bets on who was going to get bloodied and bruised. If you told him (Elon) that you made a particular choice because ‘it was the standard way things had always been done,’ he’d kick you out of a meeting fast. He’d say, ‘I never want to hear that phrase again. What we have to do is fucking hard and half-assing things won’t be tolerated.’ He just destroys you and, if you survive, he determines if he can trust you. He has to understand that you’re as crazy as he is.” This ethos filtered through the entire company, and everyone quickly understood that Musk meant business.Davis, like Brogan and plenty of other SpaceX engineers, has had Musk ask for the seemingly impossible. His favorite request dates back to 2004. SpaceX needed an actuator that would trigger the gimbal action used to steer the upper stage of Falcon 1. Davis had never built a piece of hardware before in his life and naturally went out to find some suppliers who could make an electromechanical actuator for him. He got a quote back for $120,000. “Elon laughed,” Davis said. “He said, ‘That part is no more complicated than a garage door opener. Your budget is five thousand dollars. Go make it work.’” Davis spent nine months building the actuator. At the end of the process, he toiled for three hours writing an e-mail to Musk covering the pros and cons of the device. The e-mail went into gory detail about how Davis had designed the part, why he had made various choices, and what its cost would be. As he pressed send, Davis felt anxiety surge through his body knowing that he’d given his all for almost a year to do something an engineer at another aerospace company would not even attempt. Musk rewarded all of this toil and angst with one of his standard responses. He wrote back, “Ok.”An employee could be telling Musk that there’s no way to get the cost on something like that actuator down to where he wants it or that there is simply not enough time to build a part by Musk’s deadline. “Elon will say, ‘Fine. You’re off the project, and I am now the CEO of the project. I will do your job and be CEO of two companies at the same time. I will deliver it,’” Brogan said. “What’s crazy is that Elon actually does it. Every time he’s fired someone and taken their job, he’s delivered on whatever the project was.”You did what Musk asked or were prepared to burrow down into the properties of materials to explain why something could not be done. “He always said, ‘Take it down to the physics,’” Javidan said.It’s almost a binary experience for him. Either you’re trying to make something spectacular with no compromises or you’re not. And if you’re not, Musk considers you a failure. This position can look unreasonable or foolish to outsiders, but the philosophy works for Musk and constantly pushes him and those around him to their limits.Elon believes in-house work and vertical integration. He doesn't like to rely on suppliers and wants to control supply chains. By doing that, he can cut costs and make better products. A large car company might spend $ 1 billion and need thousands of people to design a new vehicle and bring it to market. Tesla had nothing close to these resources as it gave birth to the Model S. According to Lloyd, Tesla initially aimed to make about ten thousand Model S sedans per year and had budgeted around $ 130 million to achieve this goal, including engineering the car and acquiring the manufacturing machines needed to stamp out the body parts. “One of the things Elon pushed hard with everyone was to do as much as possible in-house,” Lloyd said. “If Daimler wants to change the way a gauge looks, it has to contact a supplier half a world away and then wait for a series of approvals,” Javidan said. “It would take them a year to change the way the ‘P’ on the instrument panel looks. At Tesla, if Elon decides he wants a picture of a bunny rabbit on every gauge for Easter, he can have that done in a couple of hours.”And lastly, here are some other quotes I liked. I think there are probably too many smart people pursuing Internet stuff, finance, and law,” Musk said on the way. “That is part of the reason why we haven’t seen as much innovation.While Musk had excelled as a self-taught coder, his skills weren’t nearly as polished as those of the new hires. They took one look at Zip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software.There can be no question that Musk has mastered the art of getting the most out of his employees. Interview three dozen SpaceX engineers and each one of them will have picked up on a managerial nuance that Musk has used to get people to meet his deadlines. One example from Brogan: Where a typical manager may set the deadline for the employee, Musk guides his engineers into taking ownership of their own delivery dates. “He doesn’t say, ‘You have to do this by Friday at two P.M.,’” Brogan said. “He says, ‘I need the impossible done by Friday at two P.M. Can you do it?’ Then, when you say yes, you are not working hard because he told you to. You’re working hard for yourself. It’s a distinction you can feel. You have signed up to do your own work.”To find Davis, Musk called a teaching assistant* in Stanford’s aeronautics department and asked him if there were any hardworking, bright master’s and doctoral candidates who didn’t have families.“There is a fundamental problem with regulators. If a regulator agrees to change a rule and something bad happens, they could easily lose their career. Whereas if they change a rule and something good happens, they don’t even get a reward. So, it’s very asymmetric. It’s then very easy to understand why regulators resist changing the rules. It’s because there’s a big punishment on one side and no reward on the other. How would any rational person behave in such a scenario?”SpaceX is also busy building a spaceport from the ground up. The goal is to be able to launch many rockets an hour from this facility located in Brownsville, Texas, by automating the processes needed to stand a rocket up on the pad, fuel it, and send it off.What Musk had done that the rival automakers missed or didn’t have the means to combat was turn Tesla into a lifestyle. It did not just sell someone a car. It sold them an image, a feeling they were tapping into the future, a relationship. Apple did the same thing decades ago with the Mac and then again with the iPod and iPhone. Even those who were not religious about their affiliation to Apple were sucked into its universe once they bought the hardware and downloaded software like iTunes.The rank-and-file engineers at SpaceX tended to be young, male overachievers. Musk would personally signNow out to the aerospace departments of top colleges and inquire about the students who had finished with the best marks on their exams. It was not unusual for him to call the students in their dorm rooms and recruit them over the phone. “I thought it was a prank call,” said Michael Colonno, who heard from Musk while attending Stanford. “I did not believe for a minute that he had a rocket company.” Once the students looked Musk up on the Internet, selling them on SpaceX was easy.I would argue, however, that his brand of empathy is unique. He seems to feel for the human species as a whole without always wanting to consider the wants and needs of individuals. And it may well be the case that this is exactly the type of person it takes to make a freaking space Internet real.Source: Ashlee Vance - Elon Musk

Ever since the Apple-FBI spat that erupted beginning of this year, I spent a lot of time thinking about my own device security and wanted to share this story and all the actions I've taken. I possibly have gone overboard, but I think many of these "tips" may be useful to the community.A basic point before diving in is that 1Password for Families lies at the center of my entire security model. I store passwords, credit cards, documents, but also encryption keys within 1Password, which itself is secured with a long diceware-style password. What should be said is that in many of the measures taken, you are faced with managing your encryption keys yourself, meaning that if you forget or lose your key (really, a complex password), your data is lost.I started off by looking at my device landscape, as well as the threat models involved.Attacker obtains physical access to deviceAttacker intercepts website trafficAttacker intercepts local traffic (Starbucks, Home Wifi)Attacker gains access to cloud storageAttacker intercepts or gains access to messaging / e-mailLet's look at how I tackled each.Attacker obtains physical access to deviceDevice Passcodes: I use long, diceware-style device passcodes for my Mac, iPhone, Apple Watch and iPad. This is the first line of defense and in the case of iOS devices, these codes also encrypt the disk. Using Touch ID makes having these long passcodes bearable. On Apple Watch, I have a 7-digit code.Touch ID-enabled apps: I enable Touch ID for almost all apps that contain sensitive data when available. This applies to my banking app, my messaging (more below), cloud storage apps, Day One Journal, 1Password, MyFitnessPal, Stocard, etc.Disable Lock Screen Access: I've disabled Siri, Notification Center and Control Center from the Lock Screen of my iOS devices. Siri has known to have certain bugs that allow access to the system, and I don't want an attacker to be able to turn off wifi, execute workflows from notification center or even just read my messages.Attacker intercepts website trafficMonitor SSL: I always ensure that websites I use enforce SSL by watching the green lock.1Password: I also use 1Password when filling out forms exclusively, as it basically warns you when credentials are being sent unencryptedAttacker intercepts local traffic (Starbucks, Home Wifi)WPA2: I've enforced WPA2 on my Time Capsule home network and also hidden the network so it cannot be found by scanning.Timed Access Control: I've enabled Timed Access Control on the Time Capsule, which means I have to add any device to a list of MAC addresses on the router manually, before that device can find and access the network.VPN Services: When I'm at Airports or Public Wifi hotspots, I always have ExpressVPN enabled. They have very solid iOS apps, and a large network of servers. Unfortunately I have come across various places in Asia where their service is blocked, so I couldn't actually connect to the VPN server - another sign that a network may be prone to malicious activity - why would anyone block your from encrypting your traffic unless they want to look at it.Separate passwords for disk, network and base station: I made sure to generate and keep separate passwords for the encrypted Time Capsule disk, the base station access, and the WPA2-protected network itself.Attacker gains access to cloud storageTurn off iCloud Backups: As we saw again in the Apple-FBI case, Apple has the decryption keys to iCloud backups and can therefore access the data therein. If those keys were compromised, iCloud data would be too. The alternative...Use encrypted iTunes backups: I backup my iOS devices monthly to my Mac Mini, using an encrypted iTunes backup. The encrypted backups are on the Mac Mini, which is itself encrypted with FileVault, and backed up to my Time Capsule, also encrypted at disk level.Use zero-knowledge encryption services: I moved away from Dropbox / Google Drive / Onedrive and use Tresorit instead. They have excellent iOS apps that integrate well (using the document provider API and share sheet) and encrypt your documents before leaving the device. An alternative, but with much worse apps, is SpiderOak. Tresorit is key for me as data is not stored in the United States.Enable 2FA for services: For all services, not just storage, I have Two-Factor Authentication activated. I select services that have 2FA available.Attacker intercepts or gains access to messaging / e-mailUse a secure messenger: The EFF has a good list of messaging services, but I personally use Threema. It has servers in Switzerland, encrypts all messages end-to-end, shows verification levels and has Touch ID protection. It also still trounces WhatsApp on a number of counts (apart from the fact that WA is owned by FB). I don't use iMessage as the decryption key mappings are stored on Apple's servers and could be compromised. However I am considering a move back to iMessage as the integration with devices is pretty great, and I am hoping for some improvements to the architecture to be announced soon.Use a secure mail service: I currently have switched to FastMail, which provides basic security and has a solid business model, however e-mail is notoriously insecure by design. That said, alternatives such as ProtonMail exist but they force you to use their apps and cannot provide IMAP at this point due to the technical nature of their system. I would like to move to ProtonMail as they are Swiss-based.Some Random Privacy Notes:I deleted my Facebook account, mainly due to the noise it produced in my life. But the elimination of the Safe Harbour agreement between the EU and the US should be cause for concern.I barely use other social media, mostly again due to noise.I use Ghostery and 1BlockerI have very minimal permissions set in the "Privacy" section of my iPhone

Quora allows users to delete their account if they choose to do so. Deleting your Quora account means that the following content will be removed from public view: your profile including photos and bio, your answers, comments, blog posts, votes, endorsements, and messages. Questions you may have asked will remain, since questions on Quora are community owned, but will not be associated with your name publicly. Deletion of your account is not reversible once the process is complete. Alternatives to deletion include: 1. Deactivation [ https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-deactivate-my-Quora-account-Can-it-be-reactivated-later/answer/Quora-Official-Account ] 2. Edit your Quora Privacy Settings [ https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-edit-my-Quora-Privacy-Settings/answer/Quora-Official-Account ] 3. Deleting individual pieces of content, such as answers, comments, or posts If you are certain you wish to delete your account, visit your account privacy settings and choose “Delete Account”. Once you confirm, your account will be deactivated immediately and the deletion process will begin. If you login during the next 14 days, the account will be reactivated and deletion will be canceled. Once the 14-day grace period has expired and your account has been deleted, your content and profile will be permanently deleted, and personal data associated with your account will be removed from Quora’s databases. Keep in mind that your content may have been republished or shared by others outside of Quora. Account deletion here does not remove any links or data hosted by others. If you have further questions regarding account deletion, contact us using our contact form [ https://www.quora.com/contact ].

Dunno about hacks, but I can give you some tips.Getting StartedLots of Orientation’s mandatory things are repetitive, but I am 90% certain you will be in a group with your first-year seminar class (it’s what I did, and I was in basically the beta program for the new FYSEM setup), so I recommend going at least to get to know them.It’s a small campus, but it can be a bit difficult to navigate. Take advantage of the long Orientation to find your way around and to see what routes are available for getting to your classes.If one of your classes is in Clapp, be sure to find that classroom! Clapp can be a bit of a maze.Class SelectionYou have four years here. That’s eight semesters. You have time to get the requirements done.If all the PE classes are filled up/not a good time for you, don’t forget to check the Dance section.You only need one semester of a language to fulfill that requirement.Check out a bunch of cool classes! Some fun ones I’ve been in include Fencing, Costume Design (in the Theater department), and Exploration of Mars (but that’s a FYSEM, and I don’t know if you’ve picked yours already).If you have an idea what you want to go into, great! If you don’t, that’s cool, too! Check out lots of stuff, and read through the descriptions of different majors/minors/certificates on the website.You cannot take a 5-College Course your first semester, but trust me, there’s plenty on-campus to do.SchoolworkGet to know what your professors expect. This may be very different between two different professors. Usually they will tell you things like formatting, citation style, etc., but if you’re not sure, double-check! It’s always awesome to be told that a paper is supposed to be double-spaced.Your professors are people, too. They are not some force of nature to be feared. They like class participation. Also, if you happen across something relevant to a class, don’t be afraid to show it to your professor.Seriously, use your resources. The library is awesome, the SAW Center can get you far, there are study blogs on tumblr that can provide advice, and the teachers probably have stuff on the class Moodle to check out.If you get essays/papers back with comments, read the comments! It can provide a lot of insight into what your professor wants, and some comments can help you throughout all your classes.You’re not going to die if you are not a “model student” who spends X hours studying each day and follows instructions to the T. Find what works for you!Check out different study spots. I like to be in my room most the time, but I’ve also got a spot in the library I’ll hole up in sometimes. Common rooms can be a good place to study. I don’t know about other residence halls so much, but Torrey had a small room you can shut the door and study in peace in. A change of pace is good for you.If you rent textbooks from Amazon (which I highly recommend if you’re taking STEM classes with their super-expensive textbooks), know that Auxiliary Services can send stuff out UPS, and there’s a couple drop boxes on campus. Also, keep the box your rental came in. It’ll save you the hassle of trying to find a new box to send it back.College LifeTake. Advantage. Of. Your. Resources. Two big ones are the Career Development Center and the Health Center. Read their e-mails and their flyers.You get free therapy sessions. Use them. I met up with one of the social workers twice a month or so my first semester, and it really helped to have someone to talk to about social life, roommate problems, school worries, my anxiety issues, anything. (The waiting room also has lots of toys and coloring things and snacks.)The CDC has occasional events listed in their e-mails. Check them out if they sound interesting. Yes, you are a first-year and you may think, Hey, why does this matter if I won’t be getting a real job for years? It is worth looking. Get to know what’s there and know a few basic things so you’ll be more comfortable with them when you do graduate.Blanchard is undergoing construction. Wilder is going to get the brunt of the dust/noise/other construction things, but it will probably affect other halls around the green. If you have allergies, asthma, noise sensitivities, anything that could conflict with that, and end up in a dorm on the green, consider your options.I pulled off getting a single this upcoming year, even though I’ll just be a sophomore. How? I applied to a couple of the Living Learning Communities. Keep those in mind.Go to floor/hall events! The RAs I’ve met have all been pretty nice and fun to talk to, and they love having folks come to their events. If you’re struggling to socialize, or just feel lonely, these can be a godsend.Go to on-campus events! These can be really fun, and kind of random. Don’t be afraid to go to something that sounds odd or not quite your area. I went to the Annual Latke/Hamantaschen Debate (I’m not Jewish in the least, but I love food) and it turned out to be hilarious and a highlight of my week.Walk if you can. Walk often. There’s a trail around Upper Lake, with at least one trail branching off of it. I walked it almost every day; it’s great for getting out and chilling.I’m not sure if this is true of other dorms, but Torrey has abysmal reception. If you can’t get good reception or cannot call from your room/dorm for other reasons, the canoe docks out on Upper Lake are a good place to call, provided it’s not freezing.RoommatesPrint, go over, and sign at least one roommate agreement. My first-semester roommate and I went over it verbally, and that was not enough.Your roommate agreement is a living document. Make sure you can bring up things you want to change about it.Communicate! And do so politely! You may not always get along, and you do not have to be friends, but at least do things like warn them if you’re going to have visitors over, tell them when you get up, how heavy or light a sleeper you are, that sort of thing.If you’re going to have a serious talk about something, do so when the other is wide awake, and willingly so. You will only foster unhappiness if you try to have a Talk when your roommate is trying to sleep.Be open to suggestions and discussion. Do not be stubborn, hide facts, or ignore warnings from your roommate just because.ClubsSign up for their e-mail lists at least, if you’re interested in them. You never know when you’ll suddenly have free time when they’re meeting, or if they’ll have an event you can go to.Know your limits, but don’t be afraid to push them. I’ve been involved in three clubs regularly (the Nerd Trifecta of Bellatrix, Renegades, and Autosave), one on occasion (Knitting Club, which has a monthly Saturday tea and yarn event), and two that I switched between after a semester (OUTsignNow and Femmepowered, which changed time slots).Ones like acapella and sports groups will suck up a lot of time. Just warning you.Get involved! Talk to people! You’re all gathered for a shared interest, so clubs are a great way to start making friends.Don’t forget other meetings. Religious and Spiritual life has some stuff, such as weekly lunches talking about various topics.Food and Dining ServicesThere are menus online. Yeah, it’s not much now, but I recommend getting used to Dining Service’s website and hours. It’s always good to know when and where your favorite food will be, and the menus are invaluable if you have dietary restrictions.Sometimes things that are on the menu may not be there, or in a different form, when you go to the dining hall. They may have some other food available that was not on the menu. It happens. (I’m pretty sure mac and cheese is the most common thing that ends up there unexpectedly.)If you’re on work/study, you’re in Dining Services. If you can, work on a weekend, or near the weekend. Gracious Dinners are fun and great, but they are often in the middle of the week (and I have never seen one on a weekend) and hell to work.Ham-MacGregor is the only hall open for hot breakfast on the weekends. If you are not in a position to go to it every weekend, stockpile some oatmeal. Stockpile some fruit, too.Don’t be afraid to use your Dining Dollars.Blanchard is packed around 12:15.Certain menus tend to get packed, too. These include Abbey-Buckland’s mac and cheese Mondays, Prospect’s Dessert Dilemma and Sunday brunch, pasta bars, and Wilder’s dairy days.Wilder’s dairy food is delicious, but the dining hall is poorly set up. Be prepared to wait and claim seats via coat or ID.Ham-MacGregor and Prospect have nice, big salad bars. Take advantage of them, and don’t be afraid to mix salad bar and hot menu items.Steel-Cut oatmeal will fill you right up.The Five Colleges and Pioneer ValleyGet acquainted with the PVTA. Go to Google Maps, decide where you want to go (I recommend a day trip to Northampton), and figure out which bus will get you there.Check out events at the other colleges! If you’re involved in clubs, they may tell you about some. (OUTsignNow’s newsletter, The Gay Agenda, has a column with Five College LGBT events.)Lucky’s is a popular spot for tattoos and piercings, if you’re looking to do that. I got my eyebrows pierced at Haven, which isn’t far from it. Both are in Northampton. I know Haven’s website has coupons, and piercings and tattoos are expensive!I do not know of any supermarkets on the bus routes. Sorry.PackingAn electric kettle will get you far.Tea, tea, tea! It’s a wonderful thing, and any tea you bring will probably be better than the Bigelow served in the dining halls.Bring a fan. A big fan. It is sweltering that first month or so.The dorms are pretty good-sized, but don’t be thinking you’ll pack a bunch of furniture. I found that the desk, chair, bed, bookcase, and closet that were in the room already were plenty sufficient.A rug will do wonders for making it homey, though.Coordinate with your roommate(s)! You do not need two or more of every big thing, like fridges and large fans.Get a nice, sturdy laundry hamper. I ordered mine in a set with my sheets and while it is functional, the fabric ripped off of the handle.There’s posters on sale on the green sometimes. Lots of cool, various ones. Just so you know.You will probably gather items during the school year.Bring an umbrella and clothes for all the weather. A heavy coat, a rain jacket, good outdoor boots, shorts, tank tops, everything.Good luck, and hope to see you on campus this fall!