101 Insanely helpful websites for college students

Last Updated on January, 2024 by Edison

College life can be hard. You might have so many things to take care of and few resources.

Fortunately, there are some websites out there that can make your life easier.

I have listed 101 websites that will help you save money, increase productivity, and download research papers, and books for free.

Table of content

  1. Save money
  2. Rent&buy textbooks
  3. Apps and Google extensions
  4. Free Courses
  5. Find Research Papers
  6. Psychology
  7. Medical articles
  8. Science 
  9. Math
  10. History
  11. Business
  12. Engineering
  13. Architecture
  14. Literature websites
  15. Free books

Save Money

1. Amazon Student

Amazon student is a discounted Prime subscription program.

Also, it offers a free trial for six months. (You can also cancel at any time without a cost). Then you’ll pay 50% less than other Prime members at $6.49/month.

And you need to have a .edu email address.

Pros:

  • Two-day shipping for free on most of the products.
  • Email alerts for exclusive deals and offers for you
  • It has a referral program where you can invite your friends to join, and both of you get $5.

Cons:

  • During the trial, you can’t share your subscription with other households as with Prime.

2. eBay
On eBay, you can find different products at a fair price.

It helps you find discounts, coupon codes, and exclusive deals from your favorite stores.

3. Studentrate.com

It is an easy-to-use website. You can find the best deals with different products.

4. The Freecycle Network
It’s a non-profit movement made up of people who want to give and take used items for free.

5. Mint
It’s a money manager app. It helps you track the expenses and can help you manage your money better.

Rent and Buy Textbooks

After you’ve finished a class or the semester, why not sell the books to make some extra money? And that’s where these websites come to help:

6. Chegg

Here you can rent or buy textbooks. Another option that I liked is that you can return the book in 21 days if you switch classes. You can also hire a tutor to help you with the exams.

7. Bookscouter

Enter the ISBN number of the book and it will find the best sites that offer the best prices.

8. Textbookx

If you need to buy books for the next semester this website offers free shipping for orders over $49. And, it doesn’t offer just books but also school supplies, magazines, study guides, and more.

Apps and Google Extensions

9. Calculator

It is the most popular calculator with +20 million downloads. Why buy a new calculator when you can download it on your phone for free?

10. Strict Workflow

Sometimes I used to say to myself, surf on YouTube for just 5 minutes, and then I ended up spending 2 hours there.

Well, the solution to my problem was the strict workflow extension.

It blocks the websites for 25 minutes so you can study, then you can take a short break and start again.

11. StayFocused

This extension is a great way to overcome procrastination by limiting the time you spend on time-wasting websites.

12. Grammarly

The best grammar checker out there.

13. Boomerang for Gmail

This extension allows you to send emails automatically, by setting a time even if you’re not online.

14. Momentum

It includes a personal dashboard with a beautiful image, a to-do list, and an inspirational quote.

Free Courses

There are a lot of courses out there to supplement your knowledge.

15 – dx.org

It’s a website founded by Harvard University and MIT in 2012, offering high-quality courses from the most prestigious universities in the world.

16. MIT courses

It offers +2400 courses. You can choose between their categories:

  • Energy
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Environment
  • Introductory Programming
  • Life Sciences
  • Transportation

17. Yale

It offers full high-quality courses, suggested readings, exams, and problem sets.

18. Harvard online courses

There are lots of courses in different categories here. Some are free and for some, you have to pay.    

19. Data Camp

Data Camp is the best place to learn Data Science.

20. Tutorialspoint

There you can find lots of tutorials about programming, computer science, Microsoft, and many more.

21. Code Academy

Learn to code for free.

Search engines to find research Papers

If you need to find credible sources for your homework, then these search engines can help you:

22. Google Scholar

23. Microsoft Academic

This SE pulls content from 207 million publications. 

24. Taylor & Francis Online

25. WorldWideScience.org

It provides real-time searching and it also gives you the opportunity to search in 9 other languages.

26. CiteSeerX

It is developed by the ISTIt’s focused more on literature in computer and information science.

27. Wolfram Alpha

It’s a very useful website, especially for math. You can find formulas and definitions very fast.

28. Paperity

This site contains +1.8 million papers and 5046 journals.

29. African Journals Online

AJOL is a collection of all journals in Africa.

There are 100, 545 articles free to download.

30. Educational Resources Information Center

ERIC contains more than 1.3 million journal articles, conference papers, and other materials.

31. Bielefeld Academic Search Engine

BASE contains +133 Million documents from 6500 sources.

32. USDA

Everything you need to learn about Agriculture.

33. Analytical Abstracts

This site keeps you up to date with the developments in analytical science.

34. Arabixiv Papers

Search for a paper in different categories.

35. arXiv

It’s a large archive of e-Print in Psychics, Math, Economy, Biology, statistics, Electrical engineering, and computer science.

36. Adsabs

This site covers publications in Astronomy, Astrophysics, and Physics.

37. Computer science library

It covers all the aspects of computer science.

38. Dimension

This site contains +9 million publications from the fields of Materials Engineering, Chemistry, Nanotechnology, and Biomedical engineering.

39. Europe PMC

PMC provides access to articles, books, patents, and clinical guidelines.

The Ultimate Managed Hosting Platform

40. Journalseek

It’s a large database of free journals for different categories.

41. Koofers

It’s a great place to find documents from different universities, video lectures, and flashcards.

42. Wikipedia

It’s a good place to find definitions more quicker. But, the information, in general, isn’t of the best quality. You should always check the cited sources at the end to see where it’s coming from.

43. Merriam-Webster

Free online dictionary and thesaurus.

Psychology

44. American Psychological Association

APA is an organization with more than 115, 000 members. The articles are written by doctoral-level psychologists.

45. Brain

It’s a journal that publishes papers in clinical neurology and translational neuroscience.

46. Cambridge

47. Cogprints

It’s an electronic archive developed by the school of electronics and computer science. It contains papers from different categories, you can download them as PDFs.

48. Wiley Online Library

Here you can read journal articles for free.

Medical articles

These websites contain high-quality Free&Paid medical articles. They have an expert peer-review process.  

49. Elsevier

It’s one of the largest databases of medical and scientific articles. It contains over 15M pieces of content and 38, 000 ebooks.

50. PubMed

PubMed is an excellent place to find credible sources for your article or research paper.

51. JAMA Network

JAMA is a peer-reviewed medical journal published 48 times a year by the AMA.

52. Free Medical Journals

It contains 5088 journals which you can access for free. It also organizes them into categories making searching extremely easy.

53. DOAJ

It provides high-quality articles and journals all for free.

54. Medline Plus

Find information about any health topic.

Science 

55. SciSeek

It’s a good place to read news and articles related to science.

56 – Science.gov

This site provides access to more than 200 million pages of science information.

57. CERN

The Cern library is where you can find articles, books, and information about CERN experiments.

Math

If you love math then you will love this site. And if you don’t like math, it will change your thinking.

58. zbMath

The zbMath database contains 4 million bibliographic entries drawn from 3000 journals and articles and +180,000 books.

History

59. David Rumsey Map Collection

This site contains more than 150,000 historical maps. Pretty impressive, isn’t it?

60. Fold3

Here you can find military records, including photos, stories, and personal documents of people who served in the army.

61. Digital Way

A very useful website to learn about American history.

Business

62. American Economic Association

It includes peer-reviewed journal articles, working papers, and books.

63. Daily Stocks 

It’s a search engine for anything related to stocks.

64. EconBiz

You can find publications in business studies and economics.

Best websites for engineering students

65. Engineering.com

Here you can find video tutorials, articles, explanations of concepts, and software tutorials. This site also offers job listings from around the globe and career advice.

66. Efunda

It contains free magazines, basic knowledge of different topics, and conversion calculators.

67. Eng-tips

It’s an engineering forum where you can find answers to your questions. They also provide links to other websites.

68. EngineerGirl

This is a guide for girls who want to pursue a career in engineering. It provides “did you know contests” and links to other sites.

69. The civil engineer

A website dedicated completely to civil engineering.

70. Crazy engineers

It’s an engineering community with over 337, 000 members from all around the world. There you can find discussions, news, rich and useful resources, etc.

71. NPTEL

It is a very useful website to find free engineering courses.

72. Electrical4u

You can find electrical engineering articles and videos.

73. Electronics

You have a list of various topics to choose from including electromechanical programs, hydraulics, pneumatics, and mechanical design.

74. All about circuits

As you may have guessed by the name, this site contains everything you need to know about circuits.

75. Instructables

This site can teach you how to make various projects.

76. Automaton

It offers articles, videos, and news on robots, mechatronics, AI, and more.

Websites for Architecture Students

Architecture is an important part of our life. And there are so many websites out there dedicated to it.

77. Archinect

Anyone can contribute to this site. And this gives you the opportunity to get feedback and promote your work.

78. Architizer

It is a massive website containing over 40,000 architecture projects.

79. Life of an architect

It’s the personal blog of Bob Borson. He shows how is the life of an architect.

80. Visualizing Architecture

It’s the personal blog of Alex Hogrefe. He created the website in 2009 while he was a student. He provides high-quality tutorials. 

81. Creative Commons

It’s a search engine to find images free to reuse for your presentation.

82. Iconfinder

Index for free and paid icons.

Literature Websites

83. CliffsNotes

This site provides study guides written by real teachers and professors. You can find literature notes from different books.

84. Cummings study guides

You can find study guides mostly about Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe.

85. eNotes

This site has a huge collection of study guides.

86. SparkNotes

It helps understand books, write papers, and study for tests.

Free Books

Now, we come to my favorite part of the article, the free books. After searching for a while for quality sites, I found these:

87. EBook777

Here you can find a wide variety of pdf books from art to engineering for free. 

88. Engineering study

This site is fully dedicated to engineering.

89. Notesvarsity

This site contains over 70 engineering books. Even though there are fewer books, still, it’s worth checking.

90. Civil engineering

Here you can find multiple books on civil engineering.

91. Industrial e-books

It offers free ebooks and engineering software.

92. Tech books

It contains books mainly in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Programming.

93. Bookfi

This site offers +2.4M books from any category you can think of.

94. eBook3000

This a very useful website if you’re searching for free business, programming, and cooking books.

95. Pdfdrive

It’s a PDF search engine with no download limit. 

96. eBooks directory

This site offers 10726 free e-books in 698 categories.

97. Engineering books

Download many books related to engineering.

98. Free computer books

There you can find lots of free books about programming, and mathematics, free magazines, mobile computing, etc.

99. All IT books

Here you can download IT-related books in PDF format.

100. College Open Textbooks

This site provides free textbooks mostly about business and social sciences.

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