CollegeTA Keeps College Kids On Track

• Posted by iphoneapprevguy February 07, 2012
• Recommended for Students

A few days ago I received an email from one of the developers of a new app for college students called “College TA”. The title wasn’t exactly descriptive but I told the guy that I would take a look at the app and write a review for it. I was hoping that I would find out what the “TA” stood for by the time I finished using the app….I didn’t. After playing with the app a bit and reading the website description I still didn’t really know what TA stood for but I can assume the TA stands for Time and Assignments. If i’m wrong i’m sure the devs at ArcDNA,Inc will let me know and I’ll post a comment about it after the fact. The reason i say it stands for Time and Assignments is because that’s what this app helps students with, time and assignment tracking. In this review i’m going to be very detailed and go over all of the features of this app one by one so you can truly get an idea of what this app has within it. There’s a lot of functionality here that’s not completely apparent at first.

The home screen of the app is a bit confusing and clunky, and you don’t truly understand what each part of the home screen is used for when you first load it up. If i had any criticism at all it would be to lose some of the cartoony pictures and just go with a more descriptive text based interface. But that’s not a big deal once you understand all that’s going on inside this thing. But we’ll get to that in a bit. To give you an idea of what the screen looks like i have included a screen shot. If you can’t see the picture it has on the home screen images you can choose for 8 different screens you can then enter into. They are:

-ArcDNA – Here you can go to the ArcDNA website, rate the app, tell a friend, as well as show some love for CollegeTA on facebook and twitter.
-Locker Room – There’s a To-Do list and at the time i got the app two features were marked coming soon: Notebook and Genius (WolframAlpha Search).
-Change Photo – I’m assuming you can choose a photo for yourself to show up in discussions and things like that. It works at you’d expect. You choose change photo, your camera roll opens and you select a photo. You can also take a pic and use that one too.
-Tweet – send a tweet from the app. Very convenient feature. You can tweet to your twitter followers and stay in the app the whole time. No need for extra twitter apps.
-Todays Plans – add calendar items from here. These go write into your iphone calendar and the also show up within the Next Task events section on the home screen.
-Advisor’s Guide – This section I thought was the coolest thing. I’ll go into more detail on this later on but this is like a road map made by students for students. I imagine this thing is really helpful to many.
-studyTunes – listen to your iTunes library anytime from within the app.
-Calendar – just a way to bring up your iphone calendar.
-Registrar Office – This is where a lot of the MEAT of the app is. You can track courses, professors, assignments, events, organizations, and jobs from here.

As you can see there’s a lot going on within that home screen. So lets dig into some of the main features I found to be worth talking about. For this iPhone app review i’m going to focus on the Advisor’s Guide section and all the functions in the Registar’s Office section. I felt this was where College TA really excelled as an iPhone app that helped college students. It was what really impressed me the most about the College TA app.

First up is the Advisor’s Guide section. This section is a road map for college students broken up in to four sections (aka Checklists) for each of the four years of college. Each checklist section contains important advice and helpful tips that are pertinent to the student’s current college level. Things that a student might not think about, when they are enrolling, are listed here as helpful reminders. Below are a few of the suggestions for each of the college years so you can get an idea of what i’m talking about. I didn’t want to list them all here as there were too many to list. Suffice it to say that whoever came up with some of these suggestions was either a college student themselves, i financial planner for college kids, or some kind of guidance counselor because all the tips are very useful and should definitely be given the time to go over after you download this app. There might be some things in there you didn’t think about. Like for instance…

Freshman
Befriend your roommate: A great roommate can make all the difference in school experience.
Make a Budget: You need to know how much money you can spend on things you want or need.
Financial Aid: You need to know how much money you can spend on things you want or need.

Sophmore
Advisor: Meet regularly with your advisor to discuss college plans

Junior
Career Fairs: Attend career fairs in your area.
Study for major tests: prepare for GRE- general grad school, LSAT – law school, GMAT – MBA, etc…

Senior
Begin your job hunt: Apply everywhere and interview often.
Evaluate your future living situation: Do you know where you want to live after college? Play for it now.

As you can see these are sound good advice tips that i’m sure some student would think about but i’ll bet there’s other students who read things like this and are definitely influenced for the better. My only criticism here is that there’s no way to add your own items to the list or suggest some for future students. But that’s no biggie.

Second up on my review is the Registrar Office section. This section contains six sub sections named courses, professors, assignments, events, organization, and jobs. This in my opinion was why this app was created. To help students track all of these items in one convenient application. Here’s the breakdown of all the features in this section:
- Courses allows students to enter each of their courses into the list. For each course a student can also enter information for each course such as subject, class type (lecture, lab, etc…), start and end date, start and end time. Students can also set an alarm for this class which ties into their iphone calendar. Again the way this app ties together some of the iphone functionality really is what makes College TA a great iphone app for students.
- Professors allows students to enter each of their professors into a list. Then for each professor they can enter in the professors name, email address, contact number, office hours, office building name, and office room. The great thing here is all the detailed information that can be entered. It’s a simple interface and it’s all in convenient place.
- Assignments allows students to enter a description of the task, the type of task it is, the due date, and also they can set a calendar alarm to remind them should they forget it.
- Events allos studetns to enter any an all events they may have on their schedule while at school. Within the events area they can enter the buildng location, room number, type of event, date of the event, and end time. And once again a calendar alarm can be set for events to.
- The Organizations section allows the user to enter in their position in the orginization, the meeting place, room number, organization type, start and end date, start and end time, and set a calendar alarm for thsoe meetings as well.
- The Jobs section is where students can enter in each job they are looking to interview for. They can put in the Job title, Company Address, a start date and end date should they get the job, as well as a start time and end time. And of course that fun alarm feature is present here too.

You can truly see how the College TA app would be very helpful for any kid on his way or already going to college. It’s simple intuitive interface along with the convenience of having it all on an iphone make this app one of the best Free apps for students around. So as far as I’m concerned if you are a college kid getting ready for college then College TA is a must have app for your iPhone.