Make Heading Off to College Easier with Alexa

While Alexa has tons of uses at home, don’t leave her behind when you head off to college. There are many Alexa skills that are specific to making your dorm life better, including helping you with dorm laundromats, tracking your team, keep track of campus events, and more.

Do your laundry

Don’t wait to head home to do your laundry. Chances are your university has an Alexa skill to help doing laundry at your dorm much easier.

For example, the University of Maryland has the Terp Laundry skill that allows you to use Alexa to check if the laundry room is open and if there are free washers and dryers. To find your laundry skill, type your school name into the Alexa Skills search bar.

Without a parental figure around to help, washing and drying my seem a bit daunting. The Laundry Buddy skill can give you the help you need, from teaching you how to wash specific items like jeans, to how to get certain stains out.

Keep up with campus life

Like laundromat skills, many colleges also have university activity calendar skills so you can keep up with the latest events. For example, Boston College has the Boston College Calendar skill that helps students keep track of deadlines, game dates, and campus events. Like with the laundry skills, these skills should also pop up when you do a name search of your university in the Alexa Skill search bar.

Track your team

Even if you’re not the biggest fan of your college team, staying up-to-date with sports talk can stave off awkward lulls in conversations at parties.  To make things easy, Alexa has skills that can update you on college basketball and football scores and stats. For general information, College Football Updates and Basketball Daily – Hoops Habit will send you breaking news and flash updates to keep you informed. If you want specifics about just your college’s team, type in your team name into the Alexa Skills search bar. Many college teams have their own skill.

Find scholarships

If you’re an undergraduate student trying to make it on your own, you know there’s no such thing as too many scholarships. The College Scholarship skill helps you find new programs to apply to so you can be sure your next semester is paid for.

Get study help

There is a wide range of Alexa skills that can help you study so you can ace just about any test. Here’s some of our favorites:

• Memorize: This skill helps you memorize things like speeches and quotes.
• Grammar Teacher: Check your work with this skill. It will tell you when sentences aren’t grammatically correct.
• Study Style: Really bad at studying? This skill helps you figure out your studying style so you’re better at retaining facts.
• Study Buddy: This skill helps you build your vocabulary.
• Study Flashcards: Tell this skill the topic you want to study and it will help you learn terms and concepts related to the topic.