Santa

For anyone that is in or recently was in college, is it normal and even encouraged to have laptops in the classroom for notetaking and what not? Of course it isnt allowed in highschool, but im wondering if its worth it for college.

Got $550 worth of graduation money from various relatives, and circuit city is currently having a deal for recent graduates where I can get a decent laptop anywhere from $450-$550. Some of them apparently even come with a free printer, so its a pretty damn good deal.

Snail

if youre really commited to college (ie plan on finishing) then absolutely. Especially if typing is easier for you that writing. I never did cuz i knew i was gonna drop out but it helps keep you organized and you cant lose notes unless you lose the laptop. Plus, some profs will even podcast their lectures for you.

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Embiggener

You don't need a laptop but the degree of uselessness depends on what courses you're taking.

Any math related courses laptops are not normal, not encouraged and sometimes even discouraged. Besides being useless (equation editors are way too slow to keep up) some profs will be very annoyed at you if you bring one in since its obvious that you're not paying attention to them. People who do bring them to a math class usually are tempted to bring up youtube or another time waster, then they distract everyone around them.

In courses where you just need to write words down they might be useful if you have bad/slow writing but still not needed. It varies from school to school but a lot of courses have nearly complete notes that you buy before the course or are made available online. Then you just write in the margins if there's anything extra.

Golden Salmon

i agree with embiggener but i would extend classes a laptop would not be useful in to any class where pictures are used to illustrate ideas, this happens in math and science classes a lot, but its not unusual for a professor of any subject to use pictures and youre usually going to want to write it all down. typically just visiting a computer lab will be enough to accomplish what you need from a computer any day.

just out of curiosity, what is your intended major if you have one?

bleckuhffinity

It's pretty unnecessary, really, and most people I see with laptops spend their time in class reading gossip websites or playing flash games. I mean you definitely should have a computer, but if you already have a desktop I don't think getting a laptop is necessary.

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Bulldog

In the Northeast it is a requirement for all incoming Freshman to have a laptop.

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Santa

Plan to major in Economics and minor in Math. Starting to think itll be mostly useless, since in economics you illustrate a lot of stuff with graphs (though there would still be plenty of writing)) and mathematics its obviously only a detriment.

thundeer

What I've seen a LOT in my classes (non-math/engineering based) is that the profs use powerpoint slides, which they sometimes make available beforehand. Some ppl print them out 6 slides to a page and write notes in the margins, some bring laptops and follow along, typing notes in a separate word file. It also works if the prof doesn't use slides and doesn't like writing stuff down on the board, cause you just type down everything and if you want, condense them later into notes.

So it's helpful, but not absolutely necessary. I'd say about a third of the students in a typical humanities/social sciences class at my school use them, and only half of them for notetaking, half are just facebooking or youtubing. But remember you can use the laptop while studying too, not just at lecture!

I'd get as small of a notebook as you're comfortable with (13 inch, maybe even smaller) cause although you'll lose a lot of power (ie you probably can't play any recent games on it) 1) you get better battery life, so you don't have to sit near the ends of the rows to plug your computer into the wall sockets and 2) a lot easier to carry around. You already have a desktop so I wouldn't recommend a big, powerful laptop (I have the same setup, a desktop at home and a 10inch laptop, 1.1Ghz cpu for wordprocessing/excel/internet in the library w/ 4 hrs of battery. When studying it's great cause I plop myself in the library for a couple of hours, put on some music, and if I need to I go to wikipedia/some other site to look up stuff, or review slides from lecture, or my notes, without having to print stuff out.)

And for math classes, I've seen people type out the equations at normal typing speed using LaTeX, it's kinda sick. Freaking geeks.

bleckuhffinity

taking notes is also pretty lame, real students listen and remember everything without writing it

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Freeno

Using laptops are a lot more cumbersome than paper/pencil. Some classrooms have tiny desks where there's no room for it. Note taking would also be challenging in science/math classes like everyone else previously said.

The majority of of my classes used powerpoint presentations where they would make the files available online to print out and bring to class. Taking notes alongside the slides worked very well for me.

Other than good note taking, having a good professor is important. I've used ratemyprofessor.com with pretty good success and picked my core classes based on what I've heard from friends/classmates. Had I known this the first year of college I would have avoided some TERRIBLE professors I had first semester freshman year.

Good luck!