5 Must-Have Free iPad Apps For College Students

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It’s not breaking news that the iPad is an extremely useful and convenient device for school, business and leisure. I have had an iPad for quite awhile now, but only recently have I started utilizing it for purposes other than social media and Candy Crush. Now that school is back in session, my iPad has become a must-have tool for my studies. I want to share with you my top 5 must-have apps — did I mention that they are all free? “Free” is every college student’s favorite word.

1. Mint

For most college students, money is extremely tight (and if it’s not, consider yourself extremely blessed). Between rent, groceries, car insurance, utilities, daily trips to Target because you forgot something yesterday, credit and debit cards, keeping track of your funds can seem overwhelming. Mint will help you. View your balances, bills and budgets all on one screen. You can create a monthly budget that is completely customized, view your recent transactions, get reminders when your bills are due and even set savings goals. Mint has really helped me keep tabs on my cash. It really is worth trying out!

2. Flipboard

If you’re a college student who doesn’t keep up to date with what is going on in the world, you need to start. I’m not talking about who made the latest TMZ scandal or the newest blog post on Perez Hilton, I’m talking about hard local and global news. It’s important! Flipboard is one of the most convenient ways to read the news — and it’s a lot more fun than picking up a newspaper. Its design is very user-friendly and it’s easy to “flip” through the articles. The best part about this app is that you can customize the home page by topic and publication. It’s great for the on-the-go news consumer.

3. Adobe Reader

We are most likely all familiar with Adobe Reader, but did you know about the app? This app is extremely useful — specifically for classes that have online power points or documents. Not only can you download them and read them as PDFs, you can make notes and annotations on them as well. This way, all of your notes and documents are in one place and you won’t have to pull out anything more than your iPad to study. You can even create folders to organize your documents by class (at least that’s what I do), export documents to Word or Excel, and print wirelessly from your iPad.

4. Grades+

Chances are that you have calculated exactly how many points you need to get on that final to get an A in the class, right? Grades+ is an app that does that for you from the beginning of the semester. Enter all of your assignments by class, set your target grade, update your assignments throughout the semester, and Grades+ will keep track of it all. It tells you the percentage you need on every assignment to get that A — or in some cases, just pass the class. It also has a GPA calculator and a feature that lets you add notes and reminders to your assignments. No more grade crunching during the semester.

5. Flashcards+

I’m one of those people who make flashcards for everything. Flashcards+ makes it easy to make flashcards without having to buy index cards every week. I find this app easier to use than other flashcard apps such as Quizlet and STUDYBLUE because of its very simple design. Less really is more with this app. It shuffles your cards, lets you mark which ones you already know and reads your cards to you to reinforce the memorization. To take your studying one step further, you can browse through sets that other students have made. You can view your cards offline, too, which makes it great for last-minute studying before your test.

There you have it, my top 5 Must-Have Free iPad Apps for College Students. There is no harm in testing out these iPad apps since they are free! Maybe you will find them as helpful as I have. Good luck this semester!