We have all been in that situation when, after three or four years of schooling, we find resources that could have made those years much simpler. It took me two years of high school to find noodletools.com. Before that I was manually writing out bibliographies and works cited pages. It pains me to see a fellow college student suffering through the tedious tasks that college requires when there are resources to make them go by smoothly and cheaply.
Coming in at number one is a new site that I found called CampusBooks. Often times I would procrastinate and ultimately buy my books in the third week of the semester, and by that point I’ve already accumulated a bunch of catching up that I might never get around to. CampusBooks saves the time, effort and money that walking to the book store steals from you. Their user-friendly site shows you price comparisons across the web. They show the rental cost on Chegg.com, the going price on Amazon and the price anywhere else that book is sold or rented. CampusBooks makes it easy to get all your books shipped to you, because everything is easily assessable through their page. One of the best features in my opinion is on their “sell books” tab. CampusBooks shows you exactly how much you can get for last semester's books anywhere online. No more juggling between your school's buyback program and all the other private companies trying to profit on the turn around. Just go to campus books and you’ll be guaranteed the get back the most money.
2. Although this resource may be the niftiest for incoming freshman I have found applications for all years. DesignYourDorm.com allows you to see a virtual representation of your soon to be dorm room. You can stack beds, move, remove, rotate and add all types of furniture from a large selection. The most unique feature is that once you are done designing your space you can have DesignYourDorm.com order all the added furniture from various sources and deliver it straight to your dorm. It will be waiting for you there. Imagine that! Being able to see/plan what your dorm will look like, and not having to scurry around looking for furniture that may not fit is just one of the reasons why DYD is number two for me.
3. eNotes.com
There are tons of sites claiming to have vast archives of notes, study guides, cheat sheets etc. However I find most of them to be poorly supplied in terms of what anyone would actually need to help them succeed the busy lifestyle of a college student. I believe it was a college professor who once said, “College is 90% social, and 10% academic”. And for anyone attempting to squeeze an A (90% and above) out of only 10% of their time, sometimes a little help is in order. eNotes.com is used by teachers and students alike. This resource can be clutch when you forget or choose not to do a reading or finish a book. Give it a look, and tell me you didn’t wish you knew about this when you were a freshman in high school.
4. Zotero
Number four is Zotero. You saw me mention noodletools.com at the beginning of this post, well Zotero is noodletools.com on steroids. Zotero is a application that is a Firefox extension. This means that you can only use it if you have the Firefox web browser. Zotero, once added as an extension, serves as your one stop shop for internet data collection and management. Any time you plan on citing a source just click the “Add to Zotero” button next to the URL bar and Firefox will automatically record the necessary information to cite that page in the future. It will even create the citation if you ask it to! (This takes some experimentation to get comfortable with)
5. Craigslist
Most of us already use craigslist. The only thing I really should remind everyone is to be careful. There are plenty of scams on craigslist and if anyone ever asks for any type of money transfer or cashier's check always walk away. If something sounds funny on craigslist search it on Google to see if other people are reporting it as a scam. Otherwise craigslist is a great way to find what you need in your area, cheap!
Use the above as you like, to help save you time and money in your preparation for another fun and exciting year in college.
