For any of you who are incoming freshmen to Colby, you guys are almost there! I think two weeks or so remain until that week of orientation and COOT and such. To get ready there are probably three things you can do: shop for dorm supplies, pick classes, and buy textbooks. Next week I’ll take about the former two, however I though I’d touch on books for now. Buying textbooks can be sorta complicated at first if you don’t know where to look, but the most important thing to know is.. don’t buy from the Colby bookstore! I wholeheartedly love and support the Colby bookstore for everything except textbooks. (They have the coolest stuff.. Colby gear is cooler than ANY other school’s gear. Especially Bowdoin. Black and white? Nice colors guys #colbyisbetter)
For a normal semester, you’re going to be down at least 500 bucks after you gather your light reads for the semester from the bookstore. If you’re lazy or just don’t want to deal with dropping classes and having to return books online, then the bookstore would indeed be the way to go for you. But what I usually do is go through Amazon – I never really figured out how to get Amazon Prime/Student but manage to get a pretty good savings anyways. The books aren’t brand new, but if you’re trying to save some money (i.e. every college student everywhere) it definitely helps. This is probably more helpful if you’re set on the classes you’re taking: if you don’t know exactly what your schedule is like, you’re probably better off buying books from the bookstore where you can return them after a period of time free of charge.
Also, a word of advice that probably isn’t what any of you parents might want to hear: decide if you’re actually going to do the readings or not for certain classes. This is probably better advice after you’ve been at Colby for a bit, and as a freshman I would recommend just buying all the books you need. Plus, going into freshman year with the mindset that you’re not going to blow off all of the readings is usually a good thing. That being said, once you’ve taken a couple classes at Colby, you might know for which classes the readings are more.. necessary or not. Since I’m entering my junior year at Colby, I know what I’m studying and thus most of the classes I am taking I have either had that professor before or heard a lot about them. While I do honestly do a good amount of my readings, I think you’ll find that it is actually impossible to do every reading ever throughout your college career. You simply don’t have enough time in your schedule. So, you need to sift it out a bit.
See you next week,
Nick
