Are you an incoming college student looking to see what you should take notes with? You’ve come to the right place. For the past four years, I have been an avid tablet user with my iPad always accompanying me to school on trips and heck even a bed sometimes. I mean this thing is constantly on me, but my friends have always asked if it is worth it.
Why Consider a Tablet for College Notes?
In college, especially with your Gen EDs like biology and chemistry, you will be taking a lot of notes. Whether that’s by annotating your class notes or writing your own, you will need something to condense that information down effectively. A tablet is a great device to do that with.
You can jot notes during class and edit them digitally, which is incredibly handy when things are a little faster pace. You can also add images from the internet, which can add a lot more detail to your notes in general.
Comparing the Cost: Tablet vs. Notebook
A standard notebook isn’t too shabby either. It’s the standard method for jotting down notes just super simple pen and paper. There’s no digital editing or copying images from the internet, but the price difference between notebooks and tablets is quite astounding.
Some say that in the long term an iPad is more cost effective. At least with my pretty simple math, I beg to differ. Perhaps convenience wise a tablet is well worth the money, but the lowest tier iPad is 330 dollars plus 100 for the Apple Pencil. A typical notebook is just two dollars. Even if you need 10 a semester, that’s only 160 dollars for four years. Factoring in pens and whatnot that might increase the price a little bit, but overall the iPad is more expensive by a pretty big margin.
The Real Benefit: Dedicated Productivity
For me, I kind of viewed my iPad as a bit of a test. I’ve always been interested in tech and when I started college I knew I wanted to try out the tablet lifestyle. My love for the iPad actually came after I used it for some time.
I prefer to have everything on one device. I have all of my notes, my calendar, my emails and many other things on the iPad using Google Drive and OneDrive and that is just really convenient for me.
I’m the type of person who won’t look at his phone for like three to four hours in a given period of time because I just don’t need to. It’s pretty distracting already, so I just use my iPad to stay focused because this iPad is literally just dedicated to productivity and my journal. It doesn’t have anything related to entertainment on it.
Flexibility and Convenience
By differentiating my productivity devices and consolidating all of my files onto one tablet, I’m able to just not take my whole backpack with me every day. I will go to class with literally just my iPad and Apple Pencil.
You can do that with a notebook of course, but you don’t have as much flexibility. I’m still connected online and can take spontaneous online quizzes our professors assign us throughout the class period, which for pharmacy school yeah there’s a lot. You can also just use your phone if it’s really that necessary, so again it’s more of a convenience factor rather than a necessity.
Is a Tablet Worth It?
Frankly, it is just more convenient to use over pen and paper most of the time because you can do a lot with it. There are some moments where the technology fails and that’s when it’s not as convenient, but overall there are a lot of features that the iPad possesses that a notebook does not have.
Whether or not that convenience is worth the extra however many dollars you spend depends on you. For most college students I’d honestly say no. You’re spending a ton of money on University already and if you’re not going to take full advantage of the iPad why spend the money? You can save that and use it for a rainy day instead.
Even still, for some it would be greatly beneficial for them to use a tablet in college. They are wonderful to have and you can really step up your productivity game by a significant margin. I don’t even know if I would have performed nearly as well these past few years without my iPad. I mean my notes are top tier.
Final Advice
My suggestion would be to weigh in your options. Are you willing and able to spend a large sum of money for something like this and also would the convenience really help you or would it just be an added expense? Think on those and then make your decision.
You should definitely look around and maybe even call your University to see what other students in your major typically rock. That’s what I did when I started college, but ultimately this is your decision so just make sure to focus on your needs and I’m sure you’ll turn out all right.
My name is Sears. Thank you very much for reading and have a wonderful day.
