The open-access standard for sharing detailed methods. Essential for reproducibility; don't just keep it in a paper notebook.

Lab supply management and ordering. Great for keeping the lab manager (and the budget) sane.

Wiki-based lab protocols. A bit old-school, but still a goldmine for classic molecular recipes.

Non-profit plasmid repository. If you need a construct, look here before you try to build it yourself.

Environmental Health & Safety. Bookmark the safety data sheets (SDS). Boring, but legally required.

The statistical lingua franca of biology. You cannot avoid this. Learn it early.

The essential IDE for R. Do not try to use the base R GUI; this is the industry standard.

The glue of bioinformatics. Better than R for heavy text processing and building complex pipelines.

Package manager for Python/R. Saves you from "dependency hell" when installing software.

Interactive computing. Great for teaching and sharing analyses, less great for production pipelines.

Version control and hosting. Steep learning curve, but saves you when you delete your thesis analysis by accident. If it's not on GitHub, did you even write it?

The oracle. Copy-pasting from here is 50% of a bioinformatician's job.

Regular expression tester. A life-saver for cleaning messy data files.

Texas A&M High Performance Research Computing. When your laptop creates smoke, move your job here. Excellent support team.

Statistical power analysis. Use this before you start your experiment, not after you realize your p-value is 0.06.

Project management for open science. The best place to pre-register your studies.

Data repositories. The standard for ecology/evolution papers. Zenodo gives you a DOI for code or posters.

The R repository for genomic data. Essential, but updates can sometimes break your old scripts.

The swiss-army knife for DNA sequencing data. Fast, command-line based, and absolutely essential.

"Genome arithmetic." For when you need to know what overlaps with what.

Quality control and cleaning. The first things you run on any new dataset.

Visualizing genome alignments. The best way to "see" your mutations and verify your code isn't lying to you.

Modern Maximum Likelihood. Currently the best balance of speed and accuracy for most users.

The successor to the classic RAxML. Great for massive datasets.

Bayesian inference. MrBayes is the classic; RevBayes is powerful but has a steep learning curve.

The classic tree viewer. Simple and effective, though showing its age.

Web-based tree annotator. Makes beautiful publication-quality figures, but it is online-only.

R package for trees. Hard to learn, but allows for fully programmable and reproducible tree graphics.

Free, open-source GIS. Just as capable as ArcGIS, but free. A must-learn for any field biologist.

Citizen science data. A massive database of species occurrences and a great way to verify ID.

Global Biodiversity Information Facility. The raw data hose for biogeography.

Global climate data. The standard input for niche modeling.

Species distribution modeling. User-friendly, but very easy to misuse statistically. Read the manual carefully.

Plasmid mapping. The industry standard viewer is free and excellent.

Free cloning tool. Ugly interface, but rock-solid logic for planning constructs.

PCR primer design. The engine behind almost every primer tool on the web.

Scientific image analysis. Java-based and clunky, but the absolute king of microscopy analysis.

Protein databases. The gold standards for protein annotation and 3D structure.

Online LaTeX editor. The best way to write collaborative papers without formatting headaches.

Reference manager. Free, open-source, and arguably better than EndNote. Use the browser connector!

Copyright policies. Checks if you are legally allowed to post your PDF on your website.

Digital ID. Get one. Now. It follows you forever.

The biology preprint server. Post your paper here before you submit to a journal to get early feedback.

University resource. They have specific consultants for scientific writing and dissertation formatting.

Vector graphics editor. The free, open-source alternative to Adobe Illustrator. Incredibly powerful.

Raster image editor. Free Photoshop. Capable tool, but has a definite learning curve.

Color advice. Stop using default red/green color scales! Use this to make accessible maps.

Scientific illustration. Makes professional diagrams easy, but be aware everyone's figures are starting to look the same.

Genealogy of science. Find out who your academic "grandparents" are. Fun for seeing lineage.

The documentary of our lives. It stops being funny and starts being painful around year 4.

Nerdy humor. There is a relevant comic for everything in science.

Social network for scientists. Spams your email, but actually useful for asking authors for PDFs.

Career advice. Hard truths about the academic job market. Read this early, not right before you graduate.

Career resources. Excellent articles on non-academic paths and lab management.

Career planning tool. A structured way to plan your career goals. Required by many grants, but useful for everyone.

Graduate school resources. Know the rules. They control your dates, deadlines, and dissertation formatting.

Professional development. A&M usually has a membership. Great for writing accountability and time management.