So, you’re an incoming college student and you’re wondering, should you get a tablet or a laptop for school? Well, you’ve come to the right place. If you want the quick answer, you need a laptop first. But if you want a more nuanced breakdown and practical advice for school from someone who’s been through it, stick around. My name is Sirrus. I’m a soon-to-be graduate in my university. And I’ve used both a tablet and a laptop consistently for the past 6 years.
Three Segments of Your College Needs
We’re going to break this article down into three specific segments. First, we’ll go over your basic needs at college. Then we’ll discuss which device fulfills those needs, including their benefits and drawbacks. And finally, we’ll talk about what I recommend and how to decide what’s best for you. First, let’s start with your needs.
At college, you will need a device mainly for homework, note-taking, emailing, and projects, generally speaking. Breaking this down further, at university, many of your homework assignments will be online. That’s just like college is now. So, you’d be running a lot of different proprietary software from companies that publish your textbooks such as Pearson My Lab or McGraill Connect. Take note of that.
And speaking of notes, for your note-taking, this one is a given. You’re definitely going to be taking a lot of notes at university, especially for those initial prerequisite courses like biology, chemistry, physics, math. All of them will require some note-taking to a degree. Though, there is the somewhat common case that you will have recorded lectures, but I recommend to still jot notes down during lecture because that helps with memorizing and understanding the material.
Next, emailing. Surprisingly, you’ll be writing quite a few emails in college to your professors, groupmates, etc. So, you’ll need something for that. And finally, projects, projects, projects, projects. Depending on your major, you might have a lot of projects or you might have only a few because of how long I was at school for undergrad and grad. Yeah, I completed a lot of projects and my devices were essential toward my success with those. But each device had very different strengths.
Which Device Satisfies Your Needs?
Let’s talk about the devices now and which ones satisfy the needs I just listed. Firstly, homework. For me, many of the programs my university ran for homework simply did not work on my tablet. Even our exam software, such as Examoft or Lockdown, are only compatible with laptops. So, the laptop gets the point. But there are some cases where the tablet would be beneficial for homework, such as if it’s handwritten and you can submit a PDF for notes.
Now, this is where a tablet truly shines. If you really put thought into effective and efficient note-taking, a tablet can absolutely supercharge your game. Utilizing different apps such as Notability or Good Notes and the tools your device has to offer such as highlighting, moving text around, using different colors for key topics, scanning, exporting, and backing up notes, etc. is a game-changer and frankly a massive reason why I believe I perform so well in my undergrad. Although I have learned to succeed with taking notes on my laptop as well, a tablet is just so hard to compete with. Point goes to that free mailing.
This can go either way. Truly, each device has and or can have a keyboard attached to it. But frankly, for me, it’s just more comfortable to use my laptop with its built-in keyboard than my tablet with a keyboard because of the better formatting and better ergonomics generally. So, I personally would go for the laptop in this comparison. And finally, for projects, I’d say 75% can go for laptops and 25% can go to the tablet. For most projects you do at university, say a presentation, a lab workup, or a model, a laptop will perform far better than a tablet if the tablet can perform at all. The same issue applies to projects as it does for homework. Some programs are just only compatible with laptops. So, while having a tablet is nice for say a verbal presentation in which you can change slides on the fly and annotate, it isn’t going to work for every or really many of your projects.
Final Recommendation: Making the Choice
So, tallying everything up, it’s clear that just as I said at the beginning of the article, having a laptop is more advantageous to having a tablet as your main device. However, I want to add some nuance to this discussion because the question remains, when is it appropriate to buy a tablet for college? Well, not on its own. My recommendation would be to firstly contact your department or university and ask what is the most common laptop used by students in your major. That way you get a general idea for the specs you might need and also what operating system is most common.
For example, when I started college 6 years ago when dinosaurs roam the earth, I called my pharmacy school to ask exactly this and the person on the other line said the MacBook Air is the most common laptop in my program. Which is great. That means that for much of the work that I’ll complete, Macs will be compatible, which also likely means that generally Windows will probably be compatible, too. At that point, I also asked whether tablets are common, and the lady said very much so. Yes, because that’s commonly the case in healthcare. Tablets are used quite often, but as an addition to your laptop.
So, for you, I would recommend to first prioritize your needs and get your laptop situation settled. And then after that, ask yourself the following: Do you want a tablet? Because if you don’t, chances are you probably don’t need it, especially for most majors. Can you afford it? Because a tablet is an added expense and things can get expensive in school. And lastly, can you justify using it and use it well? Because buying a tablet doesn’t guarantee success in school, you need to be proficient at using it. Just like any tool, and it’s a skill, all those questions should be answered before purchasing the tablet as a key word here, added device, because that’s what a tablet is. It’s an addition, a complement to your setup. Not the setup, but an add-on. And with that add-on, you got to make sure that it’s actually worthwhile.
So, to summarize, should you purchase a tablet or a laptop for school? I’d recommend first a laptop. But if you want one, can afford one, and can actually justify one, a tablet can be an amazing investment into your fruitful education. Looking back at my time at my university, I’m eternally grateful I made the decision to buy my iPad. It’s a device I still use every day and it truly changed my life. So, what do you think of the tablet versus laptop topic? Do you agree with my take? Let me know in the comment section down below. my name is Siruse. This spell like Cyrus 6 rooster. Just take out the Tur. Thank you very much for reading and have a wonderful day. Peace.
