Issue date: 8/20/08 Section: Opinion

Media Credit: Battalion Admin [Click to enlarge]

In this day and age, almost everyone could benefit from a computer, whether they are a student or not. It's almost unrealistic to expect a person to keep hard copies of every piece of information they've ever come across. Enter the personal computer.

The gadgets and amenities students have come to depend upon are constantly multiplying. They use their PCs not only as a means of schoolwork and data retrieval, but as a way to keep in touch with friends and family via networking websites like Facebook and MySpace. One would be hard-pressed to find anyone who uses just paper and a pen anymore for all his or her scholastic and entertainment needs.

Many teachers use the Internet to assign homework, e-mail syllabi, post grades and to keep in contact with their students. Vista (more widely known among Aggies as Elearning becasue of its actual Internet address, elearning.tamu.edu) is a program used by several schools throughout the nation as a sort of virtual classroom. Students can access final grades, reading assignments or texts that can only be viewed online, participate in online study groups and chat rooms or be used for anything else the professor might want to communicate.

The A&M Library has thousands of journals, articles, books, newspapers and more on file. At library.tamu.edu, this database has been catalogued and is available to students and faculty from their home computers.

Aggies have access to numerous high-technology computer labs around campus, the more popular being the ones in Blocker, the Student Computing Center (or SCC) and the lab in the West Campus library. Individual lab hours and more locations can be found online at cis.tamu.edu/oal/labs. At the beginning of each semester, students are allowed 150 black-and-white printouts as part of their Computer Accessing Fees. Over that, print charges will be added to the student's fee statement.

One perk of being a college student is that they get all kinds of breaks on software and system prices. For example, for an A&M student, Microsoft Office only costs $10. The market price of this application is $400. Apple currently has a deal where a student can purchase a computer and receive a free iPod. With proof of enrollment, undergraduates can save up to 15 percent off the total price of "the latest consumer technology products" from HP (according to www.hp.com).

Once a computer is purchased, a virtual universe opens up to the user. Particularly helpful websites for the college crowd are: easybib.com, an online bibliography facilitator; howdy.tamu.edu, a portal website that links many of the personal TAMU websites to one log-in system; and cis.tamu.edu, the official website for TAMU's computing and information services.

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