North Central College

Planning your NCC courses

• Sample four-year plans for biology and biochemistry majors (including education double majors, study abroad options, transfer-student plans, pre-health, etc.)
• Planning for a career in medicine or the health sciences

Preparing poster presentations

• How to design and print a scientific poster at NCC
• Extensive suggestions on poster design
• Dowloadable basic PowerPoint poster template

Applying for research programs (on and off campus):

• PowerPoint from our Research Night presentation
• Application for on-campus summer research
• Suggestions on applying for off-campus research programs
• Developing your c.v. (a résumé for a scientist): examples of good and bad c.v.'s
• Training in Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR): required for all faculty and students receiving research support from NCC

Useful free software:

• Microsoft Office 365 - Word, Excel, PowerPoint free to students through NCC
• Irfan View - easy-to-use program for basic image viewing and editing
• ImageJ - NIH-maintained program for image analysis; many plugins available
• Fiji - easy installation of ImageJ with the major plugins used in the life sciences
• Zotero - Reference manager: collect references and easily create citations and references in lab reports (see Dr. Boaz's how-to guide)
• Veusz - Scientific 2D and 3D plotting software
• Video captioning - Custom implementation of youtube-dl and HandBrake to embed captions in video for PowerPoint (instructions included)