Beyond Essay Writing Service: Useful Tools for Students

Student’s life can be tough: different courses vying for your attention, a plethora of assignments to deal with simultaneously, not enough time to pay equal attention to all of the extracurricular activities, part-time jobs – all this is enough to make anyone’s head spin. Moreover, it seems that with every passing year student life is getting more and more hectic, with an ever-growing number of commitments and responsibilities. The answer is to look for more intelligent ways to deal with them – fortunately, these days, there are plenty of tools, apps, software and services that can make almost any student’s task easier. Here are some of them.

  Rate My Professors

What do you do before you buy something? Most likely, you read at least a couple of reviews. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do the same before taking a course? Well, with the help of Rate My Professors, you can do it – find your school, find a professor you are interested in, and you are very likely to find dozens of reviews left by other students. It isn’t always a good idea to perceive what you read here as the ultimate truth, but it can serve as a great indication of which professors deliver interesting lectures and which you should steer clear of.

  CustomWritings.com

Do you have an essay to complete but not enough time to do it? Are you buried under a heap of academic assignments without any chance to deal with all of them on time? Do you look for a place to hire somebody to help you with a particularly obnoxious term paper? You can solve these and other writing-related problems with the help of CustomWritings.com – a popular academic assistance service whose main goal is to help college students with their particularly difficult writing tasks.

  Anki and Ankiweb

Spaced repetition has been proven to be one of the most effective ways of memorizing and learning things in the long term. It won’t help you cram up for an exam in one night, but by spending half an hour on spaced repetition each day for a month you will remember the stuff you’ve revised not just during the exam, but a year later as well.

Anki is one of the best pieces of software for spaced repetition out there. It is easy to set up, has hundreds of pre-made flashcard collections you can use right off the bat. If you like brushing up on your studies on the go, there are versions for mobile devices. If you are away from your home computer, you can continue your revisions through Ankiweb – just create an account beforehand.

  StudentRate

Problems with studies per se are far from being the only challenges students have to face. Finances are just as hard to deal with, if not harder, and any help you can get in this area is welcome. Although students get a lot of special deals and discounts for all kinds of things, from clothes and textbooks to electronics and travel, it is almost impossible to stay aware of all of them when you have to deal with a million other issues. StudentRate does it for you – it aggregates students’ deals and discounts so that you don’t have to keep track of them.

  BibMe

If you ever worked on a big writing assignment, you know that actually writing it is just a part of the job. Even a well-written paper can get a poor grade if you make some serious mistakes when formatting it, particularly in the bibliography part. There is a variety of formatting styles, and each of them is notably different in the ways it prescribes you to enumerate all the works you’ve referenced in your assignment. Even within a single style, there are many differences based on numerous factors: whether it is a book or a journal publication, whether it has a single author or several of them, whether it is a printed book or a web source. BibMe takes the hassle out of the process – you simply select the style, introduce the data about your sources, and BibMe does the rest.

  Lynda

Want to pick up some useful skills but don’t have time to take another course? Lynda can help you out. It offers hundreds of in-depth video courses that can help you learn numerous useful things (mostly dealing with computer technology and media production) without spending a lot of time on it. It is especially useful if your major has little to do with computer tech and you cannot afford to spend your primary studying time on it but still want to get skills in this area.

  The OWL

Purdue’s University Online Writing Lab (OWL) should be your resource of choice if you are interested in obtaining in-depth knowledge about academic writing. It contains a treasure-trove of information on formatting in different styles, recommendations on how to avoid plagiarism, how to prepare a quality outline for your paper, and so on. In other words, if you want to not just deal with your current writing assignment but also understand why you should do this and avoid doing that, the OWL can teach you everything you need to know about academic texts.

And what websites, resources, apps, and other tools do you use to save time, money, and energy while in college? Share your recommendations in the comments!