Being a new university student can be daunting. There is so much to prepare for, from buying kitchen essentials, to decorating your room, meeting new friends, and going a little bit too crazy during Freshers’ Week.
It can be easy to forget that the main reason for university is actually studying (I know, we were shocked too) and that means you also need to access reading lists, choose your modules, and, of course, pack some stationary.
This is a list of the most vital pieces of stationary that most students tend to forget (or don’t realise that they need). It goes without saying that pens, folders, and highlighters are essential, so let’s take a look at the other things you will need.
Hole punch/Poly wallets
If you like to type up your notes during lectures and seminars, you will find yourself needing to print them out every so often. That way, when it comes to exam time or assignment season, you can have them in front of you on paper, rather than on a dozen different documents on your laptop.
Having a load of loose sheets of paper is not convenient, so putting them in a ring binder or lever arch folder is the best way to go. However, to do this you will need either a hole punch or poly wallets.
You may also have professors who hand out physical sheets of paper in class which you will need to keep. If you have a hole punch (you can get small ones that fit in your pencil case!) or plastic wallets you can slip these into your folder safely.
Whiteboard
This is the perfect way to keep track of everything in your life, both academic and social. Notebooks are great for lists, but sometimes it can be easy to forget to actually check them when life gets really busy. Having a big physical reminder of important things to do can be very helpful in making sure you don’t miss any assignments, work, or social events.
You can get plain whiteboards in plenty of sizes, and some come with the days of the week on them so you can use it as a calendar.
Tab sticky notes
These are so useful, especially if you are a humanities student who has to write essays on entire books. Another great thing about these is that they often give them out for free at welcome fairs during Freshers’ Week!
Tab sticky notes are small sticky notes that you can stick on to pages of a book and they will stick out so you can mark pages, paragraphs, or sentences. They come in lots of different colours, which is very useful when you are annotating a book and separating quotes and sections by theme.
Memory stick/hard drive
I cannot overstate enough how important it is to have a memory stick or hard drive at university. As a final year student, I have seen far too many people panic over lost work due to a broken or stolen laptop. Having your computer taken or stop working is already stressful enough; you don’t want to add a lost dissertation to that too!
While Google Docs is an amazing resource for writing essays, as it automatically saves every time you make an edit, most universities won’t actually let you submit work for grading via Docs. Having a hard drive that you can save your work onto therefore becomes vital, as it means you will always have a backup if the worst happens. It is also useful if you need to print anything off at the library, as you can simply save it to your memory stick, plug it into the uni computers, and print.