According to you, if there were endless amounts of fruit and bombs were thrown at you, you could consistently slice and chop your way to success, aptly avoiding the bombs, of course. But as college students, we don’t always realize that the everyday things we use have much more that they can do for us (besides training us to become kungfu fruit champions). Here are the top 14 apps you need to make this year killer!
1. Drink Owl
So it’s Wednesday, the infamous Hump Day, and you can’t think of any other way to ring in this most blessed of weekdays other than to enjoy a nice drink. But you soon remember that as a college student, you have absolutely no monay to get them dranks. Drink Owl swoops in here to find all open liquor stores and bars in the neighborhood you’re in, but also lets you know all the up-to-the-hour specials at each place.
2. Study Buddy
Sure, watching The Hills for the 8th time (in a month) helps bolster your future resume to be Lauren Conrad’s assistant / best friend, but listening to Speidi does nothing more for the studying brain than it does for Lauren: annoy and simultaneously entertain. Study Buddy is the ultimate academic partner – every time you stop your incredibly riveting bio-chem, either to answer a text or to check how many likes your Facebook status has garnered, the app records the “distraction” and logs a “Graph of Study Efficiency” to track how focused you really are.
3. Snap2PDF
Are you that annoying friend that never buys their books, only asks to borrow their friend’s? Well, you’ll still be annoying, but only once this year. Snap2PDF is as simple as it sounds. Take a picture of any handout/textbook page to convert it into a PDF! And seriously. Don’t be that friend anymore.
4. WaterIn
Sure, when a college student mentions “drinking,” they often mean of the alcoholic kind. But any decent biology major could tell you that there should be drinking of the water kind as well. WaterIn tracks your water intake and lets you know when you should be drinking water, or if you haven’t had enough!
5. Google Drive
I shouldn’t even have to tell you to have this on your phone. If you are a college student and don’t know what Google Drive is… I don’t even… I don’t. I can’t. Stop what you’re doing now and educate yourself. Maybe get a laptop and figure out what the internet is too. Never get caught without your midterm 40-page paper again, because with Google Drive, you can store any and all documents (and create them!) on your drive, giving you access to them at all times.
6. IntelliDrink
“Drinking is fun. Drinking dangerously is not,” said a wise reviewer of this app. Sure, we’re college students, which means we double major in drinking and staying alive. Do both easily with IntelliDrink, which asks for your age, weight, height, gender, and your drinking frequency, and then tracks how high your alcohol index is (and when it’s getting dangerously high).
7. StudyBlue Flashcards
Shoutout to Engineering and Nursing majors – gone are the days of archaic paper notecards! Welcome your new favorite study tool, StudyBlue Flashcards. Each time you go through a set of notecards, StudyBlue gives test score feedback so that you can focus on the material that you haven’t yet mastered. You can also set reminders on the app, so that it reminds you when to study and helps you maintain a study schedule before your midterms or finals.
8. Sunrise
The ultimate organization app for those of us who need synchronization between our social life and academic life. With Sunrise, effortlessly sync all of your Facebook events and birthdays, invite those you’ve connected with on LinkedIn or Facebook to an event you create on your phone with Sunrise, and even connect with your Google Calendar, so that whatever you update on your phone with Sunrise, it automatically updates to your Google Calendar (and vice versa)! It’s the ultimate tool for those of us looking to be #winning at everything in life, at the same time. Easily see everything on the same day, from your best friend’s birthday to your 8:10 class to the ABC party that you still don’t have an outfit for (thanks, no clothes rule). Plus, when you enter certain key terms when creating a new event on your calendar, it’ll give you a special icon to separate it from other events.
9. GroupMe
Whether you’re looking to plan a delicious group dinner with all your best buddies or plan when your group from Economics will meet for your class project, GroupMe is the go-to app for group texting. No more annoying mishaps when one of your friends or group members happens to have an Android instead of an iPhone, or one of them decides that they don’t like having the “group messaging” on – all of these texts stay in one, confined place. The best part? It’s iPhone, Windows phone, Blackberry, AND Android compatible – I know. UNHEARD OF. But not anymore!
10. Nike Training Club & Running
Oh, the feared Freshman Fifteen, AKA Sophomore Sixteen, AKA College Is When You Gain Weight. Finally off the chains of parental feeding, we feel liberated to eat whatever we want, whenever we want – and why shouldn’t we?? We’re college students now, and can do whatever we want! Until we realize that we have a legitimate addiction to junk food and that our parents were right all along. Now we need to lose that weight – or maybe you never gained it in the first place (your parents taught you well!). The Nike Training Club app and Nike Running App are like your own personal Richard Simmons. NTC contains multiple types of workouts that you can choose to do, depending on what you want to get out of it (“Get Lean”, “Get Toned”, “Get Strong”, “Get Focused”), and tracks your progress and which workouts you choose. It motivates you with each completed workout to work towards rewards, which come with a certain completed amount of time during workouts. For example, the first reward is given when you have done 60 minutes worth of working out. Rewards include celebrity workout plans, special recipes, and tons of other things I won’t share or else it would spoil the fun.
If you’re looking for a simpler way to ward off the FF or SS (or just to stay in shape), the Nike Running app is just how it sounds – it tracks your running. But it also can sync to your iTunes playlists, can tap into a “power song” that you have previously selected if you need that extra oomph, and tracks your progress, with updates on how your most recent run compared to others you’ve done. At the end of every run, track how you felt as you ran, what type of surface you ran on, and which shoes you ran in (you can program your running shoes into the app). If you’re one of those super competitive types, sync your runs to your Facebook and challenge other runners to beat your times / distances / personal records.
11. Songza
It’s a Wednesday night, you have your midterm at 8:10 the tomorrow morning and for the life of you, YOU JUST CAN’T FOCUS. You decide it’s because of your current playlist (who knew Miley Cyrus wasn’t good for the studying vibes?), and try to figure out what songs will help you dominate that test. But you ran into a problem – you have literally an infinite amount of music and definitely not enough time to go through it all to create a playlist. Enter Songza, your new best friend. Depending on the day and time, it will suggest different genres and moods to play from in order to cultivate a playlist just for you that will work for whatever you’re going for. Need the perfect head-pumping song to get you juiced for a night out with the group? Or a relaxing and soothing song to put you to sleep? No matter the mood or day, Songza has the playlist for you.
12. Mint
It’s no secret that college students either have very little money, or no money at all. We become vultures for free stuff and attempt to save money in every aspect of the word “save.” Sometimes we make the wrong (very wrong) choice (Hot Pockets – good idea in theory, terrible food in the mouth). Mint steps in to help you manage your finances and make sure that you are spending your money in the right places. By tracking what types of things you spend your money on, and giving weekly reports on spending, Mint is the app that makes Communications and History students feel like they could be a master in accounting. Set budgets for spending on specific things (or have Mint set them for you), and it alerts you when you have reached your budget or (more plausibly) have gone way past spending it.
13. FatBooth
We’re college students, so by design, we are easily entertained. Hence – FatBooth. It’s mission is simple – make anyone fat with the touch of a button. Simple, but hilarious. Pick your favorite friend, enemy, or celebrity, and roll with laughter.
14. Her Campus
And last, but of course not least, the ultimate guide for every Collegiette’s college experience! Keep Her Campus with you no matter where you are, and get up-to-date advice and humorous articles with everything from How to Lose a Guy in 10 Ways to 17 Life Lessons We Learned from Mean Girls.