Attending Pitt gives you many advantages: a world-class education, exceptional research opportunities, a supportive environment, and a global network of Panther alumni. Pitt IT is here to support that mission with some great benefits of their own. Get all these awesome IT perks to enhance your Pitt experience.

1.  High-Speed Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi is available in every building on campus, plus a bunch of outdoor locations, and even campus shuttles. In the residence halls, Pitt has partnered with MyResNet to provide broadband connectivity for up to ten devices per person to stream a movie, play a game, participate in a Zoom event, and use all the online services you can find. (BTW, students living in the residence halls also get free cable service, for those who still enjoy traditional TV.)

TOP TIP: Is your Wi-Fi lagging or glitching? Don’t just complain to your friends. Report it to Pitt IT! We can’t fix what we don’t know about!

2.  70+ Apps, including Microsoft 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud

Pitt offers over 70 software titles to students through the labs and various download services. Pitt IT has institutional licenses that provide Microsoft 365 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneDrive, and more), plus the entire Adobe Creative Cloud suite. There are also dozens of other productivity, engineering, math, statistics, and other apps. Use them in the Student Computing Labs or download them from the Software Download Service if you have the hard drive space! You can also get tons of mobile apps at the Pitt App Center to stay productive on the go using your smart phone or tablet.

TOP TIP: See our suggestions for getting the most popular and useful apps for the industrious Panther.

3.  B&W and Color Printing

Much of today’s work and entertainment takes place online. Good digital habits are great for your productivity, the earth, and your wallet. But let’s face it — sometimes you still need to print stuff out! Pitt It maintains laser printers in nearly every major academic, administrative, and residence hall building, including several locations with color printers and scanners (IT Services map). Just send your print job to Pitt Print, then go to any printer that’s convenient, and swipe your ID or use the Pharos Print app to print it out. Students get $63 of printing per semester. With double-sided printing on a black-and-white printer, that’s 900 sheets — way more than most students use!

TOP TIP: Check out our resources for working digitally to help reduce printing on campus and help Pitt achieve its goal of becoming carbon neutral.

4.  5 TB of Cloud Storage

Free cloud services provide just a few GB of storage, but your OneDrive cloud account through Pitt gives you 5 TB. That’s about 333 times as much storage as you get from a free Google account, which is capped at just 15 GB. Heck – you can save a single 15 GB file to your OneDrive, and still have 4.85 TB left! So go ahead and keep that Google drive for your fun, personal files (like spring break pics), but save all your academic and extracurricular files to OneDrive! You’ll need to make a copy of anything you want to save before you graduate, but for now, save yourself the $40 or more it would cost to get a 5 TB cloud account.

TOP TIP: Save all your Pitt-related files in the cloud, so that if anything happens to your device, you don’t lose anything. You can also work on your cloud files from any device.

5.  Free Learning and Development

Landing that first professional position can be challenging. Having extra skills on your resume can really help differentiate you as a job candidate. LinkedIn Learning offers over 16,000 online tech, business, and other courses so you can learn whatever you want, whenever it’s convenient — from interviewing and graduate school exam prep, to tech skills and communication techniques. There is also a wide variety of certificate options when you complete a learning path.

TOP TIP: List all your courses and certificates on your LinkedIn profile to help you stand out to potential employers.

6.  Premium Online Services

There are lots of free services available online, but the free versions are often subpar. Besides the constant ads, they also have significant feature limitations, like a 40-minute limit on Zoom meetings or only being able to use it on one device. Get Zoom, LastPass, Qualtrics, Docusign, Panopto, LabArchives, BioRender and other services you might not yet have heard of that are the standard in the field you are pursuing. When you get those services through Pitt IT’s enterprise license, you get all the capabilities of the paid account without the added cost.

TOP TIP: Get to know more complex apps that will be required in the field you are pursuing so you are able to hit the professional ground running. For example, there are lots of great free survey apps out there. But if you’ll be doing extensive patient questionnaires in research, build it in Qualtrics.

7.  Free IT Support

Phone. Email. Chat. In person. The Technology Help Desk is like having your own live tech consultant who is specifically trained on the Pitt computing environment on call at all times. For hands-on help with device setup, software installation and repair, and virus removal, bring your device into Drop-In Support at the University Store on Fifth or in the G-62 Cathedral of Learning location. Even if you’re pretty tech savvy, it’s always nice to have a local IT pro at your beck and call.

TOP TIP: If you need hands-on help on your device, but you aren’t on campus, schedule a personal virtual appointment where a consultant can share your screen and take remote control. 

Learn More

Not sure which Pitt IT services are available, how they can benefit you, or how to get started with them. Talk to a Student Tech Ambassador on the Pittsburgh campus. These students are big IT fans, and are here to help you get the good (aka, free) stuff! They can come speak to you and your friends or fellow club members, or chat with you one-on-one. Check out their Teams site at pi.tt/TechAmbSite.

-- By Karen Beaudway, Pitt IT Blogger