Best Apps for College Students that Bring Actual Value for Nursing, Law & Budget
Best apps for college students were promised by scholars to be an integral part of a student’s life, yet we need to make this list by ourselves. Back in 2011, the Education Digest composed a list of smartphone apps for teaching, research, and learning — with great enthusiasm towards the future.
They imagined the world where all tools for studying and a better life are available on the go. Where research papers can be written by voice input, and sources can be selected and found by swipes & likes.
Now, it is 2019, and still, we don’t have a list of best apps for college students. Nerd’s fixed it.
For photographs, there are must-have apps like Photoshop or Lightroom, and architects cannot imagine their life without AutoCAD. The college students, however, are left in a boring company of Microsoft Office and Google Chrome.
Here at Nerdify, we took our best Nerds to pursue research. We found the best apps for students with different majors, and ones that work for everyone. We also checked what do scholars think about them!
Let’s get rolling! Click to jump to the category that you need:
- 🎓 Best Apps for All College Students
- 💊 Best Apps for Medical & Nursing Students
- 🏛 ️ Best Apps for Law Students
- 💲 Best Budgeting Apps for Students
Best Apps for College Students: Tools that Fit All
However different majors are, some apps will be useful for every student. We made sure that they are supported on all major platforms to fit seamlessly into your unique ecosystem.
Grammarly
Website | Google Chrome Extension Page
For sure, it’s a must-have for everyone who needs to write in English — and college students do a lot of writing. You may already know about it as a spellchecker, but Grammarly has functionality that is focused on academic tasks.
This is more than it looks. For instance, in an academic style, Grammarly will help to avoid informal pronouns, contractions, and ambiguity in the language. Moreover, it will transform vocabulary, suggesting using more scientific, official words and terminology.
Academics have a good record on Grammarly too. The study by Dembsey confirmed that the usage of the application in a college writing center significantly improves student grades — as compared to those who wrote using only MS Word spell checker. Another research project confirmed that Grammarly accelerates the process of learning English by international students.
Google Drive
Desktop Website | Desktop Download | Google Play | App Store
In a recorded history of data security, 31% of desktop users has lost all their files at least once. American researchers claim that that one laptop is stolen every 53 seconds. In this time, people manage to lose 113 phones. So, it’s naïve to think that your hard-won research paper or a painstakingly crafted essay is safe on your computer. Data protection is the first concern that every student should have.
Why do we recommend Google Drive to protect your data? First of all, it provides 15 GB of storage for free — it will be enough for all your courses until you graduate as a Ph.D. Moreover, it synchronizes seamlessly among PC, Mac and all kinds of phones.
So, should you forget to take your laptop with you, you can always access your paper via phone. If you or viruses delete files, you can recover them from Google Drive’s trash bin. If you use Gmail, you can attach files right from Google Drive.
All this makes drive the best app for college students; also it’s a useful tool for professionals. The first requirement to each Nerd is to set a default directory for saving files to Drive’s folder, so nothing is lost anymore.
Foxit Reader
Website for Free Desktop Download | Google Play | App Store
Oh yeah, you love academic articles. They are long, tedious and hard to read as the text is packed densely. Moreover, they are all in PFD, so it’s hard to copy-and-paste or find anything in them. If you know how painful to work with academic articles, then Foxit Reader is a long-awaited solution for you.
Unlike in Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is a default choice on Mac and PC, you can open many tabs with your PDF files in one window. So, every academic article will be in your hand.
Also, you can run a batch search in all your documents. As you may not want open 50 articles your professor required you to download, you can select a folder and input the phrase. Then, Foxit Reader will show you a list of entries from all your bibliography — with a context provided.
The last but the tastiest feature — it’s free. Like, absolutely free, without ads and pop-up windows. It will prompt you to get an advanced editor, but all features that students and alumni need are packed in a basic free version.
Best Apps for Medical & Nursing Students
At Nerdify, we provide nursing homework help and mentor aspiring physicians. So, we know that medical studies are hard and daunting. As well as practice takes much time, we collected best apps that will save time — either in a clinic or in studying theory.
Chemistry Pro for Android, Chemistry X for iPhone — Your Chem Savers
Chemistry Pro on Google Play | Chemistry X on App Store
We won’t underestimate anything in this review. So, right of the bat — chemistry is the worst subject in nursing college. There are not many students who receive specialized training in chemistry before courses, so molecules and acids haunt their lives till the very graduation.
If you question the fact that apps for learning chemistry are a good idea, let scholars disagree with you. In Chemistry Education, a manual for college chemistry tutors, authors explicitly state that apps are the best and the most accessible way to learn the subject. Moreover, using apps for chemistry learning is recommended even for professional nurses, alongside apps for patient monitoring and drug management.
Let us be short here — the best app for medical students on Android phones is Chemistry Pro. Alongside with a period table and professional encyclopedia, it has lessons and references material for almost every college chemistry topic. Chemistry Pro will work for a complete newbie but will also helpful for Master students on book-open exams.
For iPhone owners, Nerds select Chemistry X as the most useful app. It has pretty similar functionality to Chemistry Pro — but also has a lot of flashcards and quizzes for training. Essentially, it works good as reference material, as Chemistry X is organized similarly to college textbooks.
So, there is no reason to avoid learning chemistry is a more comfortable and better way. Also, you may also say your professor that you use academically approved tools!
Medisafe — It Nails All Medication Management Issues Like Crazy
Website | Google Play | App Store
In clinical practice, you’ll discover that managing medication and treatment adherence of patients is difficult. You may have one patient with 12 substances on different schedules, or 12 patients with 3–4 different drugs prescribed.
Should you miss any drug, mistake pills or forget about intake time, you are in trouble. It will affect your grades, but most importantly, it may kill your patient. Drug management mistakes are one of the leading causes of hospital mortality. So, among the best apps for nursing students, we are obliged to provide something to tackle drug management.
Luckily, Nerds know a well-approved app for drug management — Medisafe. It’s free, but it has crazy functionality which you’d like.
1. It supports custom medication lists, schedules and can import them from patient’s EHR.
2. It sends reminders to you or your patients when it’s time to take a pill.
3. You can ask your patients to install this app and track their medication schedule from your phone. Should they miss a pill, you’ll get a notification.
4. Each time you give a pill to a patient — or the patient takes it by herself — the app reminds how the drug should be used, and how should it look. So, fewer mistakes happen.
It’s compliant with HIPAA, and many clinics and public hospitals use it already so that you won’t get into privacy troubles. Medisafe helped a lot of Nerds and nursing students already.
Best Apps for Law Students
Each time you write a legal memo, using strange Latin phrases, you may think that legal studies are old-fashioned. When you cite cases dated back to the 19th century, you may think that the law has nothing to do with technology.
However, Nerds know best apps for law students to use, which are adopted even by professors and actual court clerks. They are designed to save time and ease laborious tasks.
Google Scholar — all cases in your hands
Actually, it’s not an app — it’s an applet, which you can access from your mobile browser. However, after Google Scholars 2018 update, there are no Law Nerds left who avoid using it.
They don’t use it for searching for academic articles. Also, Google Scholar is the best engine for it. They use Scholar for free access to all case law databases in the U.S.
When you enter its case law mode, you can select almost every court in the U.S. Besides of federal courts, which are free to search for on other websites, you can access all state courts from one place. You can also narrow your search to specific instances of the justice system, say, The Court of Appeals on Missouri.
By clicking on a case name in a final search, you’ll be able to see its full text — in one place! You can also get help with citing it right in the application. Moreover, you can see how judges in other courts cited this case!
Nerds previously used 5–6 websites for figure out one law research paper, so Google Scholar is a definite game changer.
TalksOnLaw — iOS Only place for research ideas
When you need to write a research paper on legal studies, and you need to include some professional opinion, it’s quite hard to google something worthy. This application provides you with a selection of talks from professional lawyers, Supreme, and State Court judges, and legal professionals.
It’s easy to find relevant topics and talks in this app, and also cite them. Overall, it’s a useful tool for those who have an iPhone or iPad.
Law Dojo — a game-like law training app
This app is our favorite — it’s an interactive game that helps you to study law in-depth and in practice. It offers level-by-level progress on the topics of Civil Rights, Criminal Law, Torts, Contracts, MPRE Ethics, Real Property Law, Evidence, International Law, Driving Law, Law School Bootcamp, and LSAT Vocabulary.
That’s everything that a law student needs, right? As apps help to learn via gamification, Law Dojo deserves its place among the best apps for law students.
What Nerds loves the most about Law Dojo is how it scales difficulty. Almost every person who is interested in law can download it and play around, modeling practical situations such as being frisked by a police officer or paying taxes. However, should you be interested in hardcore university-level challenges, Law Dojo will give you that too!
The main con of this app is that it has lives — points you lose when you fail challenges. When you are out of them, the app will suggest you buy lives. Even if you use paid advanced lessons. Which is a bit unfair, in our opinion.
Best Budgeting Apps for College Students
The last yet the most critical app Nerds would recommend is the best budgeting app for college students. According to our study on how much students spend on education, the very minimum budget you can survive college in the U.S. is $12,000 per year, with a mediocre room and board included. If you select not to study in a community college and out of your state, your minimum is $25,620.
In that situation, an app to control budget is of supreme importance. Luckily, Nerds found a good tool among hundreds of budgeting apps.
Money Manager: Budget&Expense
What made Money Manager the best app for college students is its ability to save time. It takes a few taps to add a new expense, income or check how much money you have on the balance till the end of the month.
Importantly, it has a cool feature that allows you to save the photo of the receipt and fill in expenses easily. Nerds know that managing receipts and cash is the most challenging budgeting task, yet this app nails it. Also, it will send you notifications in a convenient time, reminding to organize remaining records.
For student users, it’s extra cool that you can set monthly spending categories, as well as assign budget boundaries to it. Should you save in one category, the app will allow you to allocate funds to other, or save extra funds for the next month. Moreover, if you are dangerously close to exceeding your budget, the application will notify you in time.
What Nerds loved the most is how this app efficiently manages multiple cards, bank accounts, cash, and savings. After you use it for a couple of months, you will be able to see what drains your wallet the most.
Also, if you decide to take a paid version, there will be an online dashboard of your balance that you could manage on a desktop.
Rounding Up Best Apps for College Students
That was a difficult review — Nerds researched 92 apps to find the best ones, and there is plenty for them! So, let’s recap what we have learned in this review.
Best Apps for Every Student 🎓
- Grammarly — an advanced spellchecker that enhances your vocabulary and helps to improve your academic style.
Grammarly Website | Google Chrome Extension Page - Foxit Reader — a free PDF reader that supports working with multiple files and searching their contents, like in Google.
Free Desktop Download
Foxit onGoogle Play | Foxit on App Store - Google Drive — an app with 15 GB of free storage, which will back up your files, recover them on demand, and will give you access to your papers via phone.
Desktop Website |Desktop Download
Google Play | App Store
Best Apps for Medical and Nursing Students 💊
- Chemistry Pro (Android) or Chemistry X (iPhone) — one-in-all tool to get chemistry help on a fly and learn this difficult subject.
Chemistry Pro on Google Play | Chemistry X App Store - Medisafe — an ultimate tool to manage medication of your patients and never get lost with schedules and prescriptions.
Medisafe Website | Google Play | App Store
Best Apps for Law Students 🏛
- Google Scholar — help to find any U.S. court cases. Federal courts, state courts, courts of appeal — any case is yours. Free, no ads, for a trusted company.
Google Scholar Website - Law Dojo — a good game-like tool to learn the law and prepare for exams. It can be as hardcore as you want.
App Store | Google Play
Best Budgeting App for Students 💲
- Money Manager: Budget&Expense — easy to track expenses and plan. Constantly updated, does not need too much time and effort to use.
Google Play | App Store
Stay tuned and clap hard for this review!
Learn how Nerdify busts myths about studying difficulty and helps students from different courses.
