Should You buy a Laptop?

When I came to University, a big concern for many students was whether or not laptops were necessary. Most people asked this question because they didn’t have one and wanted to know whether pestering their parents for a new computer was necessary for their university education. After all, this wasn’t high school anymore and for some reason using paper and pencil seemed archaic and unsophisticated. You can’t really blame people for feeling this way. We’ve all seen college movies where students at Harvard or Princeton are sitting in some eccentric professor’s lecture typing away on their laptops. But do the movies really represent reality? Do you really need that laptop for your first year? Simple answer: No. Complicated answer: It depends.

I say no, because you can get by without having one. I know a few people who chose to only bring desktop computers to university, and they do just as fine. I’ll take this moment to offer a mild digression. I think that computers these days are indispensable. You will need something to type your essays on at 3 am in the morning when your library is closed, or when looking at whatever it is that you want to look at on the internet in the privacy of your own home/room. Without any computer whatsoever, you really lose out on the independence of what is considered a necessary tool for anything these days. So I am not saying you don't need a computer at all. You do.

Back to the question at hand: it differs from person to person. People who have laptops tend to take them everywhere they go. (Well, maybe not to drunken binges). That would be fine, except for one important thing: the internet. The internet is google, so that if there's something about what the Prof says that you want to know more about, you can. It's the University site, with all the Prof's PowerPoint slides and notes on it. But it's also movies (yes, you see people watching them during lectures), chat, Skype, email, and worst of all of course: Facebook. All addictive as heroin. Especially Facebook. Lectures are full of students just feeding their addictions. Some say they can multitask. But most Profs really need your complete attention if you want to get the most out of what they're teaching.

Sometimes they might seem to be droning on, reading off the screen, or just talking about things that are completely boring. They see it as important, though, and they're the ones writing the exams that you'll be taking. Even when you have the lecture notes in front of you and it seems like nothing relevant is being added to the notes in lecture, every prof drops little hints about what's more likely to come up on the exam. They might be as obvious as a green star popping up next to a point, or as subtle as a raise in tone and extra few minutes spent on a concept. Picking up on these cues can save you a lot of time studying!

Even if you can’t find the cues, actually listening in lecture is extra exposure to the material in a different form than just reading notes, and it helps! I began turning off my cell, and disengaging my wireless internet as soon as I downloaded lecture notes to avoid the temptation of distractions. When finals rolled around a month and a half after my “technological epiphany,” I had to study less and seemed to remember a lot more when reviewing my notes. It was a huge stress reliever when I realized that the word "FINALS" didn’t really have to just be an acronym for, “F$#%, I Never Actually Learned this Sh#@.”

I suppose the University could line all the lecture halls with foil, or put in transmitters that fatally interfered with wi-fi signals. But that would spark a huge revolt. Besides, there would still be smartphones, texting, and so on unless they cut off that signal too.

But some people have more of a need to take a laptop to classes. Take me for example. My handwriting is akin to a 5 year old trying to write for the first time. Sometimes it’s so illegible that even I can’t read it. Not to mention that my hand gets cramped because I never learned how to properly hold a pencil and as a result I can’t write notes fast enough and I think it might give me juvenile arthritis if I actually tried for too long. However, I have been using chat sites since I was about 10 and I’ve gotten really good at typing things very fast. Not to mention I practically live on the internet, so computers are second nature to me and I feel a lot more comfortable with a keyboard at my fingertips than with a stack of paper.

That being said, I know plenty of people who choose to bring only paper and pens to class because they say that they can remember things a lot better once they physically write them out. A girl I know even writes them out fully in class and later that day goes home to copy them verbatim onto her computer. Different people, learn very differently, and you might find that the electronic way of keeping data doesn’t cut it for you. Have you ever got completely immersed in an e-book the way you have with a paperback? Me neither. (To the ten of you who answered yes to that, kudos to you – your focusing skills must be extraordinary.)

It really is all about preference. If you feel a laptop won’t suit your needs or your desires, don’t sweat it. There is nothing pressuring you to get one or to change your study habits to go with the latest flow. But know yourself, and don't be weak. I guess students have always found something to be distracted by. But I think it's easier to do that now because of the technology. So control it; don't let it control you.