The Web is your lifeline, connecting you to friends, family, music, and news. As you prepare for life as a grad student, there are plenty of ways you can use the Web in your daily life. Check out some of the top online tools for grad students:
Bookfinder: Avoid the sticker shock at the campus book store and head to the Web for some great deals on textbooks. With Bookfinder you can search among more than 150 million books for sale from thousands of online retailers; the textbook search option will get you results even faster. Search by author, title, or ISBN.
Campus Tech: Keep on saving money by searching for deals on all the technology products you'll need to survive grad school.
Out of the Dark: Looking for more financial help? Out of the Dark allows you to anonymously enter your income and expenses and track your spending, and you can access your information from any computer at any time. Remember, learning to budget now can save you from years of debt later. And all this is free—that's great news for grad students!
MynoteIT: Do you crave organization? MynoteIT, created specifically for students, allows you to organize your studies online. Here you can take, edit, and share notes; manage your to-do list and assignments with the checklist and calendar features; and connect with classmates through the message boards.
Questia: Too late to make it to the library? Just check out Questia, an online library with more than 67,000 full-text books and more than 1.5 million articles. Search the collection by title, author, or subject. Online tools allow you to write notes in the margins, highlight key passages, and create footnotes and bibliographies.
Google Docs: When you work through Google Docs, you can access your papers and notes from any computer with an Internet connection. It's also great for collaborative work, since you can give your study partners editing privileges to specific documents and work on them together.
Meebo: Who can live without instant messaging? When you're using public computers on campus, Meebo allows you to quickly connect to all your IM accounts. There's nothing to download, and the service is free.
Pageflakes: Do you check out Facebook, CNN, Twitter, YouTube, ESPN, and the local weather every day? Bookmarks help you keep track of your favorite sites, but that's still a lot of clicking around. At Pageflakes you can create a customized homepage using “flakes”—small versions of your favorite Web sites—that you can arrange in whatever configuration you want.By Sarah Engle, staff writer
