Improving Your College Experience
The government’s guide to higher education contains answers to some of the most common college questions: why go, what to do and how to pay.
The Secrets of College Success: by Jeremy S. Hyman
A handbook for any college student, Secrets of College Success offers short and sweet tips for everything in the college experience.
HowToStudy offers links to articles written about various skills like organizational tools and learning styles.
Devoted to helping better prepare individuals for life during and after college, the Student Branding Blog has hundreds of posts for helping you succeed.
Instead of pumping iron, how about using neuroscience to beef up your brainpower? Luminosity provides brain training, tests and memory games to help you think more clearly and quickly, improve memory quality and capacity, and maybe just make you a little more happy on the way.
Breakthrough Rapid Reading: by Peter Kump
In the college world, you read – a lot. Breakthrough Rapid Reading can help you increase your reading WPM so you spend less time reading, and still retain all that info you’ll need.
Dartmouth offers a few handouts on skills to help you get more mileage out of your textbook reading. Learn the SQ3R Method of textbook reading, and dispel commonly held myths.
What began as a simple idea – allowing students to rate their teachers – has blown into a massive community. With over 6,000 schools, 1 million professors and 10 million opinions, RMP can help you decide which instructor is right for you.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: by Stephen Covey
With over 15 millions copies sold, 7 Habits can help transform not only the way you go through life, but the way you perceive it as well.
How to Win Friends and Influence People: by Dale Carnegie
Even though it was written in 1937, this book contains ideas and techniques that are very much still applicable today. Carnegie will help you change your perspective on other people, and help you to be more successful personally.
Organization
eHow has articles for almost every facet of the world. These 10 tips will help you stay organized while juggling college with everyday life.
Sure, you know to write everything down in your student planner, but do you know why you should give it a name? Here are some tips, both strange and obvious, to help you more effectively use that pad of paper.
Google has completely revolutionized internet searches, e-mail, and almost everything else online. With Google Calendar you can make plans, add notes, schedule events and then sync it with your mobile phone or get reminders sent to you via text. Never miss anything again.
You check your e-mail, you look at Facebook, you log on to the school website, you check your work schedule, you hit your Twitter feed and glance at your Google Calendar. That’s a boat-load of passwords. KeePass stores and encrypts all your passwords, making it a breeze to put all passwords in one secure location.
Evernote allows you to save bits and pieces of information from everywhere in life and then save them to access later. And some smart phones offer apps linking you to the website. It’s like supercharging your brain and then allowing you to put it all online.
Whether you’re an AIMer, GTalker, ICQer or WIMer, Meebo has you covered. Forget installing 17 IM programs everywhere you go, Meebo connects you to all of them, keeping you snug in your social circles.
Formed when the creator was frustrated by the use of his USB drive, Dropbox allows users to dump files to a storage site online, and then provides a way for them to retrieve the files from anywhere they can access the drop.
Have you ever wished every computer was your computer? Well, now it can be. TeamViewer is free software that allows you to access your personal PC from anywhere with an internet connection.
Study Habits and Tools
Wired Study Tips from Texas A&M
Downloadable from iTunes U, this podcast focuses on ways for college students to improve their study habits.
As implied, How-To-Study breaks learning down into multiple categories to help individualize the solutions to your specific problems.
This go-to for all things learning, Study Guides and Strategies is a huge collection of information which “helps learners to succeed since 1996″. It offers tips on everything in college, even succeeding in dreaded group projects.
About.com features an entire section focused on helping students survive and thrive. There is something for everyone in this vault of good advice.
How To Become a Straight-A Student: by Cal Newport
Despite the frighteningly unwieldy title, Cal Newport’s book teaches you how to work smarter instead of harder, thus helping you to improve your GPA and social life simultaneously.
Delicious allows users to store all of their online bookmarks in one friendly location. Now, some less inclined people might use this tool to bookmark funny pictures, videos and stories on line. But you know you can harness this power to gather information for classes, share with fellow students, and keep school info all together.
Launched in 2007, Study Hacks was created by Cal Newport with the original mission “to teach students how to do very well without burning out”. 3 years on Study Hacks is still running full-throttle to accomplish just that.
The world’s largest flashcard library boasts over 30 million flashcards. And it’s also available for download from the Apple App Store for use with Apple products.
Sometimes, you need to access your documents from more than one location. Other times, you need to collaborate with one or more fellow students on a project. Google docs makes sure all your files (word documents, spreadsheets, slide shows, etc.) are just as mobile as you are.
StudyTips breaks learning information down into multiple categories, offering information on everything from critical reading to public speaking. They also break help topics down by subject, so help is easily available.
Millions of students every month visit EasyBib for an easy resource in bibliography creation. Offering MLA, APA and Chicago/Turabian formats, you would be smart to add to the over 300 million sources they have cited to date.
The Homework Center at InfoPlease helps you learn important skills for writing almost any assignment. Whether it’s essays, book reports, research papers or bibliographies, here’s what you need to know.
It’s simple, create a profile and then start creating. You can make and edit to-do lists, and choose whether to make them public or private. Besides, everyone loves checking things off lists.
Math.com provides you solutions and more to help you understand math on more than just the surface. The call themselves “the single source for all math needs.”
Besides an awesome title, HippoCampus also offers help for college classes broke down by subjects. A little stimulation for your own hippocampus.
Cramster offers help in math, science, engineering, humanities and more offering a well-rounded website. The basic functionality is available for free, but users can pay for premium help and tools for help with college classes.
Textbook Sources
Half is a subsidiary of eBay, offering competitive prices for everything, including those textbooks you’re looking for. Search by title or ISBN, and choose the price that’s right for you.
If you’re looking to buy something, why not try America’s largest online retailer? Amazon offers textbooks for every subject, and for every budget.
Textbooks offers the same search features as the other websites here, but also gives you the option to rent textbooks from their same huge inventory.
Search from a staggering 150 million available books using this potent search engine. Not only does BookFinder search every major online catalog, they do it for free, leaving you to pay only the original seller’s fee, saving the annoyance and cost of markup fees.
The #1 textbook rental site online. Not only do you save money by renting in lieu of buying, they actually allow you to return the books for free. And, for those of you with green in your agenda, in a climate considerate effort Chegg will plant a tree every time you rent.
Forget hauling around that heavy backpack, CourseSmart offers eTextbooks. In “5 minutes flat (yep we timed it)” you could have textbooks on your supported hand held device.
Time Management
From one of the most respected treating sources in the United States, The Mayo Clinic has always prided itself on superior patient care by offering high quality treatment for low cost. Time management won’t only help your productivity, it just might lengthen your life.
Getting Things Done: by David Allen
When WIRED magazine calls a book “A new cult for the info ages”, people tend to listen. GTD is a national bestseller, and can help you harness the potential of every minute of your life.
Mind Tools offers help for everything from problem solving and decision making to stress and time management. With multiple arguments covering different themes within time management, you can find the tools to help you.
Getting distracted is a fact of life. But sometimes, distraction isn’t an option. RescueTime installs a small app on your computer to track what you spend your time doing, or even what you spend your time not doing while you aren’t at your PC. It then offers details about your time spent, and offers tools to help you stay focused for as long as you need.
So, your paper to-do list just isn’t cutting it anymore. With Remember The Milk, you can add and manage tasks, organize importance, share with contacts, place map markers, and then get reminder via IM or SMS. Toss the paper already, and harness the new to-do.
About has an entire section of its website dedicated to College Life offering advice on succeeding in college. Here are 8 simple steps to effectively using your time.
From one of the Ivy League’s finest, and one of the nine Colonial Colleges comes these helpful hints on how time management in college differs from the rest of your educational life.
Test Prep and Test Taking
The College Board is the non-profit organization that has created standardized tests, such as the SAT, to gauge students’ aptitude. If anyone can offer tips on taking tests, ask the test creators.
The University of Minnesota offers strategies for all test takers. They offer the advice to make tests less of a trial.
Here Penn State offers advice, not only on test prep and tips, but on what test anxiety is and how to avoid it.
The Princeton Review, founded in 1981, offers test preparation for everything from the ACT to the MCAT. With multiple solutions for studying and prep, TPR can help with the exam you need.
Test Prep Review is an excellent example of simple design coupled with powerful content. They offer study guides, practice questions and test breakdowns tor almost every test under the sun.
For those planning on attending college, 4Tests offers guides on AP, ACT and SAT tests. For those already in college, they also offer CLEP tests for multiple subjects.
Offering tutorials and practice session, Number 2′s services actually adapts to your learning styles to offer a privatized plan helping you fully prep for your upcoming tests.
Brainy Podcasts
Twice every week, Josh and Chuck lead the SYSK Army into the unknown. Nothing is off limits, everything from ticks to breathalyzers are explained with this podcast’s signature humor.
Each week, more than half a million people download the new episodes of TAL. Ira Glass, the host, leads you through tons of topics with an honest glance into today’s society. TAL contains extremely heartwarming moments, along with some surprisingly sad and everything in between that all combine to make up This American Life.
This podcast offers people debating issues, with more intelligence than your average yelling match. Hear the opinions, and decide for yourself.
Don’t be scared, there is no actual scientist nudity involved. The Naked Scientists take science questions and then deliver the answers straight to you.
The Writers’ Block is a weekly reading of every different type of writing, from professionals to amateurs. This literature lover’s gold mine has everything from the shortest poetry to full-length non-fiction.
With more than 1 million downloads every month, The Moth draws users in with its unique storytelling. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be spellbound by these amazing yarns.
Paying For College
THE place to go for information and applying for all federal student aid. FAFSA would be a good first stop for college funding.
Welcome to a wealth of financial aid information. Step-by-step guides, FAQs and a lingo guide round out this guide to college cash.
Using FastWeb, you can submit a profile which is then matched with a database of more than 1.5 million scholarship awards worth more than $3.4 billion. Why not get some for yourself?
Another free-of-charge help for scholarship information, FinAid has won multiple awards for excellence in public service.
Boasting help in finding some of the $11 billion available in merit-base scholarships, MeritAid focuses completely on searching through the colleges in your area to give you a slice of that money pie.
From one of the leading experts on loans, College Answer helps you navigate the confusing maze of financial aid.
A free resource for financial needs, Mapping Your Future can help you plan your own path to paying for college.
Rated a “4 Star Top Pick” by Money Magazine, Mint provides a easy, simple and free way to keep track of all of your hard earned cash. Budgeting in college can be a beast, so Mint does it for you. And, once your budget has been met, it can also help you set goals to afford that upcoming spring break vacation.
CNN offers a simple calculator for how to afford college. Understanding how much college can cost will help you plan accordingly.
Great Non-Fiction For College Students
Freakonomics: by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Freakonomics teaches us what economics can really do. By helping us understand that the world revolves around incentives, we can learn to harness their power and truly understand “the hidden side of everything.”
The Tipping Point & Blink: by Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell here teaches us how Hush Puppies can behave like a virus. Confused? Get The Tipping Point and you’ll understand the forces that make products, ideas and messages spread like wildfire. Blink is aptly described as “The Power of Thinking Without Thinking”. Gladwell will help you understand and unlock the hidden potential of your brain.
The Long Tail: by Chris Anderson
The Long Tail explores the change in business over the last 100 years, and how it has provided us the freedom of choice in product.
The Glass Castle: by Jeannette Walls
Wells explores her young life with a dysfunctional family. As they bounced around from place to place, Wells eventually grew up and escaped her harsh life, becoming a college graduate and successful journalist.
The 4 Hour Workweek: by Timothy Ferriss
Learn to work smarter instead of harder. Ferriss teaches you the main difference between efficiency and effectiveness, and why you should strive for the latter.
The Millionaire Next Door: by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko
Forget the man in the mansion on the hill, the actual millionaire is the man living next-door driving an old car, and living in an average house. By embracing frugality, anyone can be The Millionaire Next Door.
Article researched and written by John Wharff. Thanks John!
No related posts.