On my first day of orientation at Stanford, the obligatory inspirational speaker told us “Collaborating with your classmates will be key to your success here at Stanford.” After a couple of years under my belt, I’ve realized that he might have sounded cliché, but he was damn right.

Whether it’s collaborating with a team or desperately emailing TAs for help at 3am the morning of a midterm, there isn’t a day where I don’t need to communicate with a group in college.  But, it isn’t always rosy. The constant need for group communication does have its fair share of problems, but when I get back to school, I think I’ve realized a few ways micromobs could be pretty useful.

#1 Somebody else knows the answer to your question… but you don’t know who

It isn’t uncommon to run into a ridiculously hard problem on a weekly problem set. Asking that friend down the hall for help isn’t enough—he’s stumped too. You could try asking a TA for help, but they can’t always give a substantial answer because they’re too busy being bombarded with emails by other desperate students.

If you get your class on micromobs, you could easily ask for help from anyone in your class. That way, your TAs and professor also have all the more reason to give you the best help because not only are they helping you, they’re helping your entire class. That’s like shooting 100 birds with one stone (kinda)! 

#2 You need to study… but can’t find a study group

It can be a bit of a pain setting up a study group before exam day without having your teaching staff facilitate them. It might be because you don’t know enough people in your class or you’re that sort of awkward person in the corner that doesn’t feel like asking random strangers in person if they’d like to study (it’s okay engineers, I feel your pain).

With a mob, all it would take is a one-line post in your class’s mob: “Anyone want to study tonight?” Or if you’d rather stay in your warm, cozy room, you could just collaborate with each other through your mob.

#3 Critical announcements get lost… and you end up going to the wrong building for your final

This one luckily hasn’t happened to me, but my roommate ended up being late for his final because he didn’t catch the announcement that our final’s location had changed.

Instructors, all it takes is an @all message to save your students’ pain (and GPAs). By typing 4 letters, you can get a hold of your entire class whether you need to announce something as urgent as an exam location change or just a small change in the homework.

#4 You piss off your group members by overlooking an email

We’ve all had to work on a group project and most of the communication ends up one way or another through email. This is fine… until you end up having to sort through email threads that make craigslist look like Olivia Munn.

Skip the ugly outdated email threads. Don’t miss your teammates’ messages by creating a mob for your group. Trust me, they’ll thank you later!

Have you figured out any other ways micromobs is useful for school? Is there any way micromobs can be better? Let me know in the comments or hit up our user mob!