20 Useful Websites For College Students

Dropping out of the comfortable high school life and going to college can be quite a shock to your system since you need to overhaul whatever you’re life has been like so far completely. People usually resort to building their own complex routine, and each of these 20 useful websites for college students can offer you a valuable bit of help, no matter what you’re studying. There is a lot that your computer can help you with. For me, basically my whole education went through my laptop with no exceptions, and this includes the studying process itself, as well as anything that contributes to it Even if you’ve got one of the 12 highest paying part time jobs for college students, you could benefit from organizing your finances better, scheduling your activities efficiently and much, much more.

However, improvement only comes if you want it to so there are much deeper problems to tackle than what these websites can offer. A lot of people, facing an actual challenge with actual consequences that can affect their future, crumble under the pressure of doing well and through trying to work faster and better, they exhaust themselves and render their bodies and minds inoperable for days on end. It’s good to take everything with moderation, even work. Others, meanwhile, take the opportunity of being away from home where nobody knows them or their reputation from school to enjoy life to the fullest which for them often manifests into a sequence of awkward nights, followed by severe hangovers. Don’t get me wrong, though – the two best things anyone will ever get out of college (aside from a degree, maybe) are the skill of organizing your daily life and the contacts you make through parties worth of an Adam Sandler-directed movie.

Once the classes and social activities of all sorts are over, you’re pretty much stuck in your dorm, trying to funnel whatever information you’ll need into your head. This is where a lot of people make the biggest mistakes. It’s true that the educational system that’s lead you to college is severely flawed in the way that it gives you a fairly predictable set of challenges, the solutions for which you hard code into your brain. A lot of the straight A students I’ve known found it extremely hard to study in college at first because the routine they had built for themselves worked no more. The way you are expected to absorb information and rule out what you need and you don’t in college is light years away from what you were used to so the first thing you should always learn is how to learn efficiently. If you think you’ve got a problem with that, this list is just for you.

There are many daunting aspects to starting college or getting used to it but keep in mind that everything you can’t deal with in the conventional way, you can get around. All you need is a little bit of creativity and the ability to think out of the box. The internet and all the resources that people with similar problems have given back to the community can help you immensely so even if you’ve barely learned how to use a computer without breaking anything, you should get online and start working on it. Let’s take a look at how you can do that.

20. Coggle

A very important aspect of any field of study is organizing your ideas or the information you store in your mind. When you have it all laid out in front of your eyes, you can solve problems a lot more efficiently. What Coggle does is let you create very simple and intuitive mind maps (quite like spidergrams) which are irreplaceable once you need to brainstorm a new idea or problems you need to solve.

19. Cheatography

Cheatsheets are a great way to top off your long days of learning. Sometimes you forget the slightest detail and the whole network of information bits you’ve memorized becomes useless because of a single missing link. Cheatography provides you with stacks upon stacks of cheat sheets in a wide variety of study areas.

18. Evernote Web

Evernote should be everyone’s go-to note taking application and if you don’t already use it on your desktop computer/laptop or every mobile device you’ve got then you can use their web interface, called Evernote Web. It allows you to take on the full functionality of Evernote with nothing more than a web browser.

17. Essay Punch

Essay writing is a lot of what you’ll do as a college student. No matter what you’re studying, the chances are that at some point you will have to write an essay you most certainly don’t feel like writing or just can’t think anything of. Essay Punch is an interactive tool that helps you organize your ideas and streamline your writing process greatly.

16. RefDesk

Need to know some facts? Do you need credible statistics you can use to fool other people into thinking you’ve got your life together? RefDesk is the place you’re looking for because, behind its mid-90s look, lies a massive directory of links to resources on anything you’d ever want to know.

15. UpWork

Maybe you’re not doing quite well with the financial side of your life like the bigger part of the student population. UpWork is an excellent way to start making some money on the side as a freelancer if you’ve got the time and any skill you feel is applicable to real life work. It’s always hard to start out but if you play your cards right you’ll have a considerable source of income in no time.

14. Todoist

I never personally got it, but a lot of people love using to do lists for anything from their job or studies to their daily lives for tasks as trivial as moving an object from their coffee table to another spot. Todoist is a very powerful and elegant to-do list and task management solution that you can use for free.

13. Coursera

If you’ve got some side interests, want to dip your toes in a completely unrelated area of study or need to hear something you’re learning from someone other than your professor, then take a look at Coursera, an excellent platform that offers free courses taught by actual university professors. They even issue certificates of completion for free for some courses which might be useful for some.

12. Habitica

If you want to build up some healthy habits like not using all your time to play games, Habitica is, well… a game. However, it’s the type of game that takes your life as the plot and you as the main character in it and tries to interactively help you achieve daily goals, as small as they may be and rewards you for them.

11. BibMe

Creating citations after you’re done with one of the longest papers you’ve written and you don’t even remember half the sources you used can be hell, especially if you’re trying to do it at the break of dawn under heavy sleep deprivation. However, BibMe steps in to let you do that in minutes, using each of the widely accepted formats.

10. Sleepyti.me

Forget about the whole seven/eight hour rule. This doesn’t apply to college, it never has and most probably never will. However, you will still need to be something more than a zombie once your alarm manages to pull you out of eternal slumber. Sleepyti.me helps you calculate when the optimal time for you to wake up is so you can feel fresh.

9. Lifehacker

College isn’t just about studying. You’ll be on your own in the sense that you’ll have to lead a somewhat adult-like life for the first time (for most). Lifehacker is a great directory of nifty little tips and tricks that can make your day-to-day life better.

8. Study Hacks

On the other hand, Study Hacks, taking the eighth spot in our list of 20 useful websites for college students, is the studying-oriented tips and tricks directory that you should become familiar with to squeeze that little extra out of your working time.

7. Chegg

Textbooks are horribly expensive. Your on-campus bookstore is most probably a horribly bitter joke when it comes to selling or buying books. On Chegg you can save a small fortune by renting or buying used books if your curriculum allows it.

6. Rate My Professor

Imagine a Yelp-type of thing which isn’t used to threaten exhausted restaurant staff because they forgot to bring an extra napkin. Rate My Professor is a platform like that which lets you see ratings for over a million professors in different areas so you can plan better if you want to take a new class.

5. StudentRate

We already talked about the whole money issue so let’s dive straight into it – StudentRate is practically an aggregator for discount offers on items you’d find useful in your daily life. It’s great for students on a tight budget who are looking to buy all sorts of things.

4. Stack Exchange

Once you realize that you’re not the only person to have a particular problem and ditch the whole special snowflake attitude towards what troubles you, you’d find out that someone, somewhere has already offered a solution and this place might be Stack Exchange. Having sections for all sorts of topics, this is the biggest question and answer site out there.

3. Mint

When you’re on a tight budget you need to squeeze every last bit out of your finances and an old and tried way to do that is by carefully planning your spending and keeping track of how you stand financially every day. Mint does that for you in a powerful and elegant way, so there is no need to use complex maths voodoo.

2. Google Drive

You most probably have a Google account. Use it to store all your important files, make spreadsheets, presentations, written documents and access everything on each device you own, no matter whether it is your desktop, laptop or smartphone/tablet. Once you manage to incorporate it into your workflow, it becomes a game changer.

1. Wolfram Alpha

This is not only one of the 20 useful websites for college students, it’s one of the most useful websites ever because you can just feed it any sort of word, question, maths problem or anything that comes to mind and it will just spew out more information that you’ll ever need about it, as well as it will walk you through the solution if you input a maths problem.