Student Software Benefits
Your student email can often get you access to different software packages for free or at a reduced price. Some of these are opportunities provided by McMaster University, but others are offered externally. Below is a collection of these packages and how to access them.
Internal Software
Microsoft Office 365
McMaster provides a site-wide license to Microsoft's suite of office tools like Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Instructions for activating this license can be found here.
Generally, just follow this link: https://portal.office.com/. To sign in, use your student id attached to @ads.mcmaster.ca.
LabVIEW
LabVIEW is a visual programming language, specializing in systems engineering and available for Mac or PC. McMaster has access to a site-wide license paid for by the engineering department [1]. You can get access to LabVIEW by picking up the installation disk from UTS (University Technology Services) in BSB-245.
Along with the install disks you will find a serial code to activate the software. If you create an account on National Instruments, you can actually register this serial code under your account, giving you access to the latest software downloads for both Mac and PC.
External Software
Github Student Developer Pack
https://education.github.com/pack
Github is a development and version control platform. Registering a student account will give you a free subscription to Github. This gives you access to creating free repositories for your code.
The student pack also gives you access to numerous deals for other software, like a 50$ credit for DigitalOcean (a cloud server service that you could use to host a website. Pricing starts at 5$/month).
It is also possible to get a free subscription to an organization account. For instance, if you have a Github organization for your Lab and want the repositories under it to be private, you can do so for free this way.
Jetbrains Software
https://www.jetbrains.com/student/
Jetbrains provides a suite of IDE's for many different programming languages including Python, Ruby, SQL databases and more.