With beautiful weather and lingering O-Week excitement, it’s easy to forget that we attend Cornell to get a degree. But although the dreaded classwork and prelims are soon to hit us all like a ton of bricks, your adjustment to classes may be a wee bit easier with the help of these game-changing tools.
1Strict Workflow
All students who are in a time crunch will become better focused with this extension. Strict Workflow puts you on a 25-minute distraction-free grind followed by a 5-minute break. Before starting the timer, you put your most distracting sites on a blacklist, thus helping you temper your procrastination habit.
2Memorize!
If the limiting factor of Strict Workflow gives you anxiety and you actually want to study while getting sucked into Facebook, Twitter, or whatever site you waste too much time on, this one’s for you. The first step to using Memorize! is to enter a list of questions and answers for whatever subject you’re studying. Then the extension will pop up at specified time intervals on different websites to ask you a question. Questions will be asked until you’re able to answer all of them, or if you manually stop the extension. Unsurprisingly, this extension was created by a college student!
3SVRF Tabs
Rather than the bland recently-visited sites page that pop up whenever you open a new tab, SVRF fills your screen with a new breathtakingly beautiful 360º image from somewhere around the world. In the dead of winter, you’ll may forget that you’re stuck in the library until the reality of your upcoming prelim hits you.
4Kami
In Kami, we finally a way to easily annotate those uploaded PDF reading assignments. Kami is a very user-friendly tool where you can digitally add text, highlights, shapes, images, and comments to otherwise static documents.
5Power Thesaurus
Power Thesaurus is a lifesaver when you want to sound more ~sophisticated~ while writing a paper. Instead of spending time opening another browser tab to find a thesaurus, simply double click on a word or open type it into the search bar from the browser icon, and a small pop-up with a list of synonyms and antonyms will appear. Take that, FWS!!
6Grammarly
Another helpful tool for writing papers, Grammarly will check your grammar, spelling, and vocabulary variation for what you write online. The extension underlines the errors with a red line that you can hover over and click on a suggested change. Grammarly also has a website that catches errors when you copy and paste bodies of text or upload a document.
7Split Tabs
This one is for the multi-tasker student (aka all of us). Instead of clicking between window tabs, Split Tabs allows you to have multiple tabs open in a split screen style. After downloading this, you may even maximize your productivity.
8Save to Pocket
With the clash of bustling headlines and busy schedules, it can be difficult to relocate an article that caught your eye. When this happens, you simply click on the extension icon, and it saves the link to your account which is synced and will be accessible from any of your devices that have the app.
