This is our first “How I Work” with a student—and what a student. Ana Humphrey was this year’s winner of the Regeneron Science Talent Search, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science and maths competition for high school seniors. She was awarded the $354,555 top prize for developing a mathematical model “to find the existence and probable locations of exoplanets missed by the Kepler Space Telescope.”

Ana is also an environmental activist and the founder and president of the Watershed Warriors Initiative—so when she’s not finding planets outside our solar system, she’s just, you know, saving the Earth. This is how she works.

Most of us only put pen to paper during the occasional lecture or workplace meeting. The rest of the time, we stick to a phone or laptop. This infographic explains why you should make more time for old-school scribbling.

The feeling I associate most with my early university days is exhaustion. I wrote all my papers at night and fought sleep every time a lecture got a bit dull. You can’t live for years on a sleep deficit, though, so here’s what I should have known from the start.

When kids are between two and four, they're bubbling with questions — preschool children ask their parents an average of 100 questions a day. (My daughter seems to ask this many on the drive to school — How do the cars stay in the lines? Who makes the lights change colours? Why don't they make a wall so the bicycles can't get hit? Why do motorcycles get to go in front of us? She is very much into the inner-workings of street traffic these days.)

A typical lesson in a Western classroom might look something like this: "What's the most common gas in Earth's atmosphere?" the teacher asks. Kids raise their hands.

Many high school students get part-time jobs to help pay for expenses or start saving for university. In her book Make Your Kid a Money Genius, author Beth Kobliner suggests students shouldn't work more than 15 hours a week, though, citing a University of Michigan study.

Apple is bringing back its Back to Uni deal for Australian and New Zealand students. Eligible customers can score a $100 Apple Store Gift Card when they buy a Mac for university. You can also score a $70 Gift Card when you buy an iPad Pro. That's in addition to Apple's pr-existing education discounts on Macs, iPads and AppleCare. Read on for details.

Selling books and textbooks you don't need is a great way to declutter and make some extra cash. There are quite a few good sites to buy and sell books, and BookScouter shows you their offers all in one place.

There are a great many students who are enormously attracted by the idea of a diplomatic career. It's a job that takes you out and about internationally and gets you engaged with international and transnational policy issues -- from climate change to people trafficking to managing health pandemics.

These jobs sound inherently fascinating, and they are. To build a career as a diplomat you will need good grades, experience, social skills... and a little bit of luck.

If you've ever had to write a reference paper, essay or lab report, you know what it means to struggle with an overwhelming amount of information to organise, or a blank page looking back at you. WriteWell helps you organise that information easily, and offers writing templates to help you get started with your paper.

Google has launched a new education site, which gathers programming tools and other resources for you or perhaps your kid to learn computer science, a hot subject these days.

Few of us enjoy making mistakes, but mistakes are inevitable when you're trying something new or challenging -- and failure is how we get better. Coder Christina Cacioppo writes about teaching students programming and how the most successful beginners were the ones who made more mistakes.

Hi Lifehacker. I will be finishing the HSC soon and starting university next year. For lectures I'm not sure if I should bring an exercise book or my laptop? What is the most common among university students?

If it feels like you forget new information almost as quickly as you hear it, even if you write it down, that's because we tend to lose almost 40% of new information within the first 24 hours of first reading or hearing it. If we take notes effectively, however, we can retain and retrieve almost 100% of the information we receive.

Just because you're writing everything down when you're in a meeting doesn't mean that you're engaged. Absent-minded note-taking isn't beneficial if you don't put thought into what you're writing; instead, you should approach it like a student.

You might not think that an academic computer science course could be classified as an export of military technology. But under the Defence Trade Controls Act -- which passed into law in April, and will come into force next year -- there is a real possibility that even seemingly innocuous educational and research activities could fall foul of Australian defence export control laws.

Any university teacher who does not harbour a painful recollection of a failed lecture is a liar. On one such occasion, I felt early on that I had lost the students entirely: those who hadn't sunk into comatose oblivion were listless and anxious. Ungracefully, I threw myself even deeper into my PowerPoint presentation to save me from total ruin. Years later, I can still hear myself reading aloud the bullet points from the overhead and see myself turning around to the students to sell these points to them.

Hi Lifehacker, I plan on submitting my resume for a couple of new jobs soon. One thing I feel that I should put in it (but which I also feel ashamed of) is that I withdrew from university earlier in my life; even though I didn't complete any courses within the degree or learned much from it. In fact, I left after the first week.

Just like the old pen licence you had to get back in primary school, kids now have the opportunity to try their hand at a "digital" licence. Rather than being an official document to certify children as internet citizen, the Digtial Licence is a project by The Alannah and Madeline Foundation to educate children on the ins and outs of the online world.