Having a general moan...

[Arun]

Hi Vic

I am not sure if you have tried either the MPS or MDU (depending on which one you are with). I have heard that they are meant to be great for advice, although I am not sure how useful they will be.

When I was writing my dissertation I found that rather than getting paper copies of journals I would get the electronic PDF version so I could make it really big on the screen, rather than straining my eyes. But that depends on how comfortable you are with looking at the computer screen.

Good luck with the dissertation.

[John Smith]

Hi Vic,

There is software avaiable (or at least, there was!) for Win98 which will do speech recognition... but to be honest, if you have a PC old enough to be running Win98 still, I very much doubt that it would be fast enough to be useful at recognising your voice!

[Andrew MacLean]

Vic

So, take this opportunity to switch to a nice little G5 iMac.

[John Smith]

Ah, but as an impoverished med student... can she afford it?

[Louise Pembroke]

she should be GIVEN it!!

[Emma_Marie]

Hello Vic,

Just to say i totally emphathise with you on this issue. The thoughts of doing a dissertation next year is horrible to everyone - but for people like us its like a nightmare.

I'm at Uni and luckily (through many a prayer! ) i have been supported extremely well by my school and the Uni itself. I received a grant at the start of my course for equipment that i may need. With this i got Zoomtext and Kurzweil 2000. Zoomtext enlarges all images onto the screen (up to 300%!) and Kurzweil reads from the computer. Basically all i have to do is scan an article to my computer and all is read back to me. (A great help when trying to read 13th Century Articles!) Both programmes have the advantage of allowing me to change the colour of the screen to one that has less glare.

By no means am i really disadvantaged in comparison to other students but with the help of this software and alot of hard work i have got through.

I would recommend that you look into the software, it really is invaluable to me and without it i don't know where i would be. The only disadvantage that i can think of is the financial aspect, for both software and a compatible scanner it costs approx £1300, i was lucky that i got funded for it. But you should definately look in2 it.

All the best,
Emma

[Louise Pembroke]

There must be a way of getting this funded Vic because you are going to need extra help for the forseeable future

[Emma_Marie]

I agree Louise. What i did was go to the disability services at my Uni and talk to them. At this stage you can simply ask for advice - they are usually very helpful. If they think they can help they will actually apply for the funding from your education board - you do not need to declare any of this to your school, its at your discretion. The disabilty services are bound by some act not to declare any information to anyone unless they have your prior permission. I hope this helps.

Emma

[Louise Pembroke]

It's harder with medicine though because you are supposed to be superhuman with no health issues at all
I'm thinking there must be a way outside of the med school??

[Vic]

New computer.... need to persuade Tony Blair to give us poor students (a lot) more student loan first... Yes unfortunately I think it would be a case of buy the software OR pay my rent. I think funding from the university wouldn't happen, although it's something I am definitely going to look into over the summer

'AS' - I'm with MPS (professional insurers for medics) and getting advice from them might be an option, yes. The idea of doenloading he PDF files is actually a very good one, I'm not great with computers and just have this automatic tendency to print everything, but some of the articles are really small and that would work well.