As UCLA students, you have access to a fantastic range of resources for learning about technology. It’s just that because UCLA is so big and fragmented, you may not be aware of all of them. But you should be! If you were to pay for all of these things, it would cost you hundreds of dollars, while they’re available to you here for free.

Here are some of my favorites:

Lynda.com library of video tutorials (click on the “Lynda” link on the right sidebar)
I love Lynda.com! These carefully produced videos will teach you everything from basic HTML to project management to 3D modeling. And all of the courses come with transcripts and files to download. If you were to subscribe as an individual, you’d pay $25 a month; we get it for free!

Safari technical books online (click on the “Safari” link)
If you prefer learning from a book, you’ll appreciate this huge collection of technical ebooks. These can be really expensive to purchase, but we get them for free! You’ll just have to access these from campus or use the UCLA VPN. Note that all of these books are cataloged in the UCLA Library database, so you can access them just by entering a keyword (e.g., “HTML”) into the catalog’s keyword search form.

Free walk-in statistical consulting
Got questions about data analysis? You can ask a human being over at the Statistical Computing Group! Find the hours on the website, along with some very helpful tutorials and links to further information.

Free cloud storage with Box
Need a lot of space to store project files? You have it! Just use your UCLA ID to log in. Box works a lot like Dropbox, but with enhanced privacy, so you can store student records (for example) with a clear conscience. If you need more space than the default, check with ITS to see if that’s possible.

Technical Workshops at IDRE
UCLA’s Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE) offers regular workshops. Some of the topics, like using UCLA’s high-performance computing cluster, may be a little advanced, but others, like an introduction to the programming language R, are useful for anyone!

Support for Undergraduate Research from the Undergraduate Research Center
Did you know UCLA offers undergrads grants for travel to conferences? I didn’t! There’s a lot more, too, from opportunities to get paid for collaborative research with a faculty member to workshops on public speaking.