Check out Pivotal Tracker, even as a student I'm planning to try this out on my next university project.
From a Software Engineering perspective this "plans the work and works the plan",
allows you to focus the most on the two important tasks "planning" and "monitoring"; and it makes "time management" and "optimized resource allocation" a lot easier... And the extra benefit: You work as a team! :-)
Pivotal Tracker is a free, award winning, agile project management tool
that enables real time collaboration around a shared, prioritized backlog.
Velocity tracking and emergent iterations
Make planning decisions using accurate projections based on past performance.
Story-based iterative planning
Base your software project management on proven agile methods.
Real-time collaboration
See what your team is doing and react to change instantly.
The three most related comments:
Pivotal Tracker is a fantastic product. We've become a more efficient development team since we started using it. And even better, the management team gets on-demand visibility
into my team's priorities and accomplishments.
- Jim Gochee, VP Engineering, New Relic
We love Pivotal Tracker! It is a supremely awesome tool for helping us developer-folk do some of the hardest tasks we're faced with: estimating amounts of work in simple terms, helping clients re-prioritize work, and tracking our progress based on our own estimates.
- Charles Brian Quinn, HighGroove Studios
Pivotal Tracker is a great lightweight tool for running distributed Scrum.
- Jeff Sutherland, Chairman, Scrum Training Institute & CEO, Scrum, Inc.
But well, I guess you should just try it... ;-)