Having been a student for a large portion of my life, I can appreciate a good organizer or day planner. In college it is especially easy to become overwhelmed with the different projects and papers and midterms you have for each class, and add on top of that your separate but hectic schedule of socializing, playing in that scrabble club, or simply meeting some friends at the downtown bar cum lounge Jupiter to throw back a few drinks and maybe pull some embarrassing social faux pas.

From high school to college to graduate school, many of us survive because of our ability to organize and allocate time to our various commitments. While some are able to mentally record everything in a succinct manner – and this usually does not exist beyond high school -, many require a tangible system of organization, whether it be a notebook with lists, an actual organizer journal, or even a computer notepad document. Yet, nowadays everything conceivable is being condensed onto our mighty portable phones, and the iPhone does not forget the busy and technology-eyeing student as a massive demographic to please.

Observe MyClasses by GUI Cocoa Software, a handy dandy organizer squeezed into one $1.99 app for obsessively neat students to drool over. Depending on what you record, it keeps a log of your current courses, your assignments, and – definitely the most popular feature I would assume – a GPA calculator for all those over-achieving students who can’t stand not knowing if they dropped a few points over the semester. When creating a course, you name it however you please – I’m sure most students would simply list the course as BIO 160 rather than “Evil Spawn” – and then you have the choice of adding other features, like grading scales, assignment weights – those pesky midterms usually take up at least 50% of your grade -, credits in the course, the professor’s name and email, the building and room where the class is located, and the days and time when the class takes place. Naturally, you may add as many courses as you can, but I’m sure you won’t add more than 18 credits… unless you’re insane.

When creating assignments, you enter in general information like the type of assignment – quiz, midterm, research paper, project -, the due date, and for which class it is; however, there is also a priority setting from low to high depending on the level of urgency you feel the assignment has, and an option to click “complete” once the assignment is finished. When looking at the assignments content page, there are three bars to the right of each assignment, each showcasing a gradation of colors that become more red in correlation with higher priority. You may also choose to have the assignment contents page list your assignments by either course, due date, or priority; I found this incredibly useful as it could notify me of how long I have until a particular assignment is due, whether it be a month away or at the end of the week.

The GPA calculator is probably the crowning achievement of this app, because all you need to do is enter in your courses and credits and the grade you received, and voila, the GPA is calculated for you. Granted knowing one’s GPA is a huge matter of consternation and frustration, this feature of MyClasses will be greatly revered.

I’m surprised MyClasses doesn’t contain a calendar option, a feature many organizational apps have just by default. This and a page specifically showing completed assignments would improve this app immensely, as would an ability to upload file attachments. That way, the iPhone would truly be a condensed student organizer. All that would be left to create a super student on-the-go would be the ability to write word documents on the iPhone. One could conceivably write an entire paper on the bus to school then print it out via wi-fi server connections at the school. Way to create procrastination anarchy.

Had I been able to use an app like MyClasses while I was in college, I probably would have been a little less stressed over constantly misplacing my organizer, or accidentally throwing away that odd bit of paper that had some important information concerning a paper. For the scatter-brained, My Classes certainly offers some hope in the organizational realm. Perhaps when I head off to graduate school MyClasses will become MyBestFriend.