6 Useful Websites / Apps Persisting and Avoiding College Burnout

By Robert Parmer

It’s that time of year again; the latter half of second semester. The time when Spring Break is so closely approaching us, that the week of freedom ahead is a borderline distraction. And what’s more, the recuperation period also known as summer, is right around the corner.

Ending the term on a high note can sometimes prove to be a challenge. Especially when burnt out, drained emotions start to set in. The longing for a time without the rigid structure of university life gets increasingly heavy as sunshine and good times start to badger our mindsets.

Now is the time, to be well versed in all the things that will help you overcome student fatigue. After reading a recent College Puzzle post titled 5 Must Have Academic Apps for Students, I was inspired to curate my own list of useful websites and apps for college students. If you aren’t already using–or at least familiar with–the following websites and applications, do yourself a favor and explore all of these options. You may find each and every one to be helpful in their own unique ways.

Good and Cheap Cookbook

Life after high school graduation is a strange time for many students living on their own for the first time. A foundational piece of the college puzzle is learning how to keep yourself properly nourished. Minimal cooking experience and often times less than ideal food budgets get in the way of this basic endeavor. If you opted out of a cafeteria meal ticket, there is still hope!

Leanne Brown is the mastermind behind the most cost effective cookbook I’ve ever read. Brown’s cookbook, appropriately titled Good and Cheap, has hundreds of recipes designed to be simple and cost efficient.

Best of all it is free to download. The recipes in this cookbook were originally created for those on food stamps (a $4 a day budget per person, on average). But it definitely doesn’t skimp on creativity or tastiness! Good and Cheap focuses on simple, easy to prepare meals, that college student’s wallets and stomachs can agree with.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is one of the best places for digging deep into research efforts, but is also an excellent tipping-off point. One of the main reasons why Google delivers such perfect search results so instantaneously, is because the entity has indexed the majority of the internet and Google Scholar certainly follows suit.

Google Scholar is an even more refined version of its big brother. It generates searches results that are composed of highly authoritative, scholarly articles. The vast majority of these are written by professors themselves, so the authority is unmatched. This is an easy way for college students to sift through all the less credible ‘noise’ of the internet.

Mint

Mint is a personal finance tracking application by the company Intuit (creators of the recognizable QuickBooks and TurboTax software). This is particularly useful for those attending college because as we all know, budgeting is not easy when you’re typically broke in first place.

Are you trying to keep up with your spending but manage to stay so busy with school that you don’t have time to sort it all out? Mint helps you track your spending in numerous ways because it creates easy to follow budgets, tracks transactions, and can surprisingly even check your credit.

Roger Hub’s Final Grade Calculator

That moment when it all comes down to the final. You’re riding the pass/fail line hard, and stress is piling up because you aren’t even sure if it’s possible to get out of the hole you’ve started to dig yourself into. Most college students have experienced this at least once in their blossoming college careers.

That’s why Roger Hub’s final grade calculator is so helpful. It’s a website that allows students to quickly and transparently input three key pieces of information to see what their final grade will be, before the term is closed.

MailTrack

The premise of this app is simple: a tag is inserted into emails you choose to track using MailTrack. This tag is invisible to the receiver, but allows you to view some crucially important information about the status of your sent email. Has the receiver read your email? If so, how many times has it been read, and on what type of device? Mailtrack answers all of these questions and gives you detailed and current information regarding the emails you send.

People typically don’t want to seem overbearing through an email, and the MailTrack application helps eliminate this. Is it time to follow up on that email you sent about a possible internship next year? MailTrack helps paint a picture of the unknown. It helps you make these decisions.

Grammarly

While I love writing, I sometimes don’t remember the more intricate grammar rules. Grammarly helps me clear up any confusion, without hunting down grammar rules. It’s essentially the modern day equivalent of when spell check was introduced. Thankfully, we no longer need to sift through the pages of a dictionary to spell a word correctly. Now you don’t have to search the internet about every question pertaining to grammar: use Grammarly instead!

Robert Parmer is a freelance web writer and student of Boise State University. Outside of writing and reading adamantly he enjoys creating and recording music, caring for his pet cat, and commuting by bicycle whenever possible. Follow him on Twitter @robparmer