5 apps that will save your freshman year
Lucy Naland | Presentation Director
Here are five apps that will make your busy college life easier.
From group projects to that elusive REM cycle, with college comes new tasks to keep track of. But like the rest of life, your time at Syracuse University can be made simpler with the right tools. So, start syllabus week off right by downloading these five apps to manage your college career starting with freshman year.
My Study Life
From the time you arrive on campus, you’ll have dozens of different to-dos to worry about: meeting your roommate, remembering to lock your door and learning your way to the dining halls. But once you block out the noise, the most important thing during your first week on campus is actually getting to your classes.
My Study Life helps you prepare for classes from syllabus week and beyond. Once you enter information about your class, including days, time, room number and the name of your professor, the app turns on alerts to ensure you’re in the right place at the right time.
The app is also useful for scheduling because it provides a very visual, blocked timeline of your week so you don’t overbook yourself. Add in My Study Life’s exam and assignment tracking, and you’ll have your academics under control.
Sleep Cycle
Even the most organized schedule isn’t very useful if you can’t wake up in time for class. No matter how long you’ve been in college, waking up for class gets more difficult as the weeks go on, especially as you juggle work, clubs and a social life.
Sleep Cycle features sleep-tracking technology so you can make the most of your beauty rest on a weeknight. The app will figure out the best time to wake you up and create a graph that shows how well you slept. You will get details you knew you wanted about your sleep patterns, and it makes waking up for that 8 a.m. lecture a lot less painful.
Simply indicate to Sleep Cycle a time to you need to wake up by and leave it open at night so it can listen to you sleep. It’s not as creepy as it sounds, I promise.
Outlook Mobile
Your syr.edu email address is about to dominate your life, so you can’t settle for just checking it when you’re at a computer. Download the Outlook Mobile app to help you stay on top of all your school-related emails, from class announcements to Dear Orange Friends memos from Chancellor Kent Syverud.
Even though SU has detailed guides to help you get your inbox on your phone’s mail app, the setup is long, complicated and annoying. Since the syr.edu email system is powered through Microsoft, signing in on the Outlook Mobile app is the way to go. Just log in with Office 365 and you’re all set — no configuration settings to worry about. You’ll never miss a class cancellation notice again or memo from the chancellor again. And once you receive your first Dear Orange Friends email, you won’t want to.
Google Maps
Sure, the SU North Campus covers 270 acres which contains nearly 50 academic buildings. But you have way too much pride to be that freshman crossing the Quad with a paper map on your first day, trying to tell the difference between Crouse and Crouse-Hinds halls.
Thankfully, nearly every building on campus is listed on Google Maps, and most include pictures, too. Google also knows all the different paths on campus, so it’s finally possible to make that 10-minute dash from one side of campus to the other.
Google Docs
Whether it’s for comparing notes with friends or writing a heavily-annotated midterm paper, Google Docs will be an indispensable tool during your time at SU. The mobile Google Docs app allows you to edit assignments on the fly and share them over email or Blackboard with classmates or professors.
The best part of the easy-to-use mobile app is that you can do a huge chunk of work completely off your phone. With all its collaboration, commenting and formatting tools, Google Docs puts Microsoft Word to shame.
Brett Weiser-Schlesinger is a senior newspaper and online journalism and information management and technology dual major. He can be reached at bweisers@syr.edu.
Published on August 23, 2017 at 11:02 pm
