Smartphones are sometimes not allowed in high schools, so it is safe to say phones are not necessary for high school students. Teachers can confiscate your smartphones if they see their students carrying one in the middle of the class.

But how about college? College life is way different than high school life. Professors will never confiscate smartphones from their students in classes. The worst thing can happen is just threatening to confiscate, but less than 5 times for 3 years.

Some students even bring their tablets or laptop to class because they can load PDF files and slideshows. Your smartphones or tablets or laptop are able to appear in classes as long as it doesn’t disturb anyone.

Students certainly cannot survive college without laptop but how about smartphones? How does smartphone help in college?

Information Access

With fast spreading speed of social network, people now mostly communicate with each other through Facebook. Usually, any class has its own Facebook group, Facebook fan page or at least a group chat. Class monitor or anyone related can post updates and assignment through these channels. There will be sometimes you are about to leave house for school then you hear about the suspension, social networks are good way to spread the news and avoid wasting time and traffic jam.

Can you survive you college without these conveniences?

The answer is yes if you have good friends to keep updating for you.

Notes, Boards and PowerPoints

Smartphone camera will be most useful in college when student take picture of what is on the black board of on the screen. Some professor allow to take pictures just because they don’t want to wait until you finish copying. They can even give you their files, slideshows and all the reference materials data on the computer and you can load it into your smartphone if you need.

In this situation, you can totally survive through college without smartphones if you works hard enough. You can borrow others’ material, copy and print them. You can read the paper instead of watching the smartphone screens.

Group discussion and group works

College requires you to work a lot either individually or in teams. You must communicate and make friends with as many people as possible. When working in a group, not all group members will be free for face-to-face meetings due to time availability or distances. In this case, online meeting is a wise choice. You must then use your laptop, your smartphones frequently or go to the computer shop to meet up with other members.

If that’s still not possible, the only solution for this maybe a meeting with some absences.

Talking about other people who non-tech geeks. They usually use basic phones such as Nokia and BlackBerry at first and wonder that why everybody can have crushes on such things like smartphones. It’s a waste of time and money. But just 2 or 3 years later, they use the most high-end smartphone at the time. When I ask them, the answer is still the same: organizing schedules, connecting with friends, saving files on their smartphones, entertaining purposes, etc. Nevertheless, when being asked if it was a ness, they said no. Agree.

The one who carry the best gun is not sure to win the war, just like smartphones are not a demand to survive college. But if you own one, it will help you a lot. It helps your study, you work run smoothly and organizes tasks in a good manner.

Certainly, the keys to survive college are connection and efficiency. So that, smartphone can one ly be helpful when you use it wisely. Smartphone is means of  support, not a necessity.