Monday, August 17, 2020

Apps That Will Help You out at Michigan

Throughout your time here at Michigan, you will slowly start finding apps that are helpful and make your life much easier. Well, what if you know about all these apps before you even come on campus? In this blog, I will be talking about some useful applications that can be downloaded onto your phone that will most definitely help out your time at Michigan.

The first app is the official University of Michigan app, and being a Wolverine, this is a must have app! This app keeps you updated on announcements, events happening at Michigan and Michigan news. It also shows all the dining halls and recreational sport centers offered on campus (This is particularly helpful if you are new on campus since you won’t know where everything is in the beginning as well as their names). You will also be able to search for bus stops, building names and the names and information of people in the Michigan community. I would also recommend getting the Duo Security app as Two-Factor Authentication is now mandatory in order to log into your Michigan account. 


The next three apps are related to school work. The first one is the Canvas app. Canvas is the site that is used by the University for all their classes and the app will allow you to have access to everything in your classes as well as your grades. This is especially helpful when you need to check something for a class and it’s not the most convenient to take out your laptop. The next app is the MPrint app. This app easily allows you to use your phone to print your documents at any Michigan printer once you upload your documents to the MPrint website. It’s also quite helpful to have an app that can scan documents for you. Especially now that a lot of classes are remote it’s very likely that you’ll have to scan and upload a few documents. Personally I use an app called Scannable but there are other apps like Microsoft Office Lens, Adobe Scan and many more.


U-M Magic Bus on the App Store

UM Magic Bus is also another useful app to have. This app shows you all the Blue Bus schedules, their routes and their bus stops. It also shows you real time locations of each bus and that way you always know where the busses are. In the beginning I avoided taking the busses at Michigan because I was afraid of the whole system as it seemed too complicated. I would suggest trying to figure out the bus system as early as possible. You could do it together with some friends or ask an upperclassmen how it works. The bus system becomes really helpful when it becomes too cold to be walking long distances or when you have to go for classes on North Campus. 


Lastly we have PayRange and Freshman 15. PayRange is an app that is used to do your laundry on campus. Instead of having to look for quarters whenever you need to do laundry, you can just load money onto the app and use that to pay for laundry. The Freshman 15 app shows you all the dining halls on campus, their operating hours as well as their menus for each meal throughout the day. 


Written by Matthew Wu

Summer Orientation Peer Advisor

Undergraduate Student

South Africa

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