It’s really easy to overbuy for freshmen year. When I was a freshman, I made a lot of mistakes in my dorm shopping. There are obvious things you need, like clothes and laundry detergent, but I wish I’d known some of these subtleties before I went shopping.

Textbooks and chocolate are essential.

Obviously, before you start buying anything, consult with your roommate(s) and school website. Don’t bring anything that the school provides in the rooms already.

General tips:

• I go to school on the opposite coast from where I live, so I had special concerns in terms of getting all my stuff there. Whenever I purchased something the summer before freshman year, I tried to buy it online and have it shipped directly to the school. I saved a lot on shipping costs that way. Consider whether shipping an item you already own will cost more than buying it near campus. It was cheaper to buy my fan on campus than to buy one at home at ship it there, even though the fan I bought was more expensive than one I would have bought at home.
• Avoid colored bed linens. You can’t bleach them.
• Avoid splitting costs of appliances with roommates. You’ll just have trouble deciding who will keep it.
• Keep your cardboard boxes for when you have to pack your things for summer. At the end of the year, there was a mad rush for boxes at the campus bookstore. I just stuck mine under my bed all year.
• Look for a dollar store near campus. My roommates and I bought all our dishware and cleaning supplies there.
• Buy your textbooks early so you can get them cheaper online and have them ready for class. But first, email your professors and ask whether the “required” textbooks are really required, or just recommended. The most frustrating thing about college is buying a “required” textbook for $200 and never using it.
• If you’re not sure you’ll use something you buy, keep the receipt. I bought an iron at Bed Bath and Beyond, never used it, kept it in its packaging, and returned it the next summer.

Must have:

• Refrigerator. It can be tiny, but you’ll want one. My school has a fridge rental program, which my freshmen roommates and I tried. It wasn’t worth it; for the $225 we spent renting a fridge/microwave combo for one year, we could have bought a fridge that would have lasted longer. Even though my dorm has a public fridge, I wouldn’t trust food I put there to stay there.
• Mattress pad. When I did my shopping, I assumed that since I didn’t need an extra mattress pad at home, I wouldn’t need one at school. Unfortunately, dorm mattresses suck. I got through one semester and decided enough was enough. My best Christmas present that year was my 4-inch memory foam mattress pad. Worth it.
• Plain old water pitcher. The bathrooms in my school’s dorms are down the hall and we don’t have sinks in our rooms. When you want a glass of water at 3am, you’ll be grateful for that pitcher of water. I got mine at the dollar store.
• Electric kettle. I borrowed my roommate’s so often to boil water for ramen that I ended up just getting one for myself. Essential for ramen, tea, and instant coffee. It need not be expensive; I got mine for $20 at a drugstore.
• Painter’s tape. When the freshmen arrive on campus and find they can only hang their posters with painter’s tape, there’s a mad rush on the bookstore for the stuff. Buy it early.
• Cold medicine. When everyone gets sick at the same time, the bookstore will run out of Nyquil, and you won’t want to leave your room anyway.

Don’t buy until you get to campus, and then only if you find you need it:

• Printer. My school, like many, has a campus-wide printing system. I bought a printer, but found I didn’t print enough to justify the cost of having my own. I ended up selling it.
• Bed risers. For all you know, you’ll have a bunk bed that you can’t raise. But if you have a single bed, bed risers are a must for more storage space.
• Water purifier. Don’t bother unless your dorm’s tap water is undrinkable.
• Furniture and fans. Your dorm should provide essentials like desks and chairs and waste bins. It’s better to wait until you get to your room and see how much space you have before you buy extra furniture. That said, a folding bookshelf and extra chair are really nice to have. Make sure any furniture you buy can be made smaller for transport. (Do NOT buy these; they fall apart if you put books on them.)
• School supplies. Buy paper and pens to be ready, but wait until you go through your first session of each class before really stocking up on school supplies. You never know when a professor will have a special requirement, supply-wise.

Another question I hear often is whether to get a Mac or a PC for college. For the most part, it doesn’t matter. Make the decision based on what kind of repair facilities you’ll have access to, whether you’ll need to run any special software for your major, and what you can afford.

One last hint: Amazon now offers a service called Amazon Student. Sign up with your .edu email address, and they’ll give you Amazon Prime for a year. That means free two-day shipping on most items. As far as I can tell from the terms and conditions, it doesn’t look like they’ll automatically renew the subscription at the end of the year, too.

I’d love to hear about other students’ lists of essentials. Leave a comment, or email me at mystitat@gmail.com. Good luck shopping!

• Flip flops. Without them, shower at your own risk.

December is a particularly hectic time for college students: in addition to all the normal holiday preparations and festivities, we have an extra hurdle: finals! For this reason, most of us can’t get out in time to get a Christmas tree, even a little one, before it’s time to go home for winter break. So, inspired by Pooh’s tree from Winnie the Pooh and Christmas, Too, I decided to bring a little holiday cheer to my dorm suite by making a wall-mounted paper tree. I think it worked out pretty well, and only took an afternoon to print and assemble. (Click images to enlarge.)

You’ll need:

• Christmas tree template image
• Color printer and white paper
• The Rasterbator
• One string of tree lights
• Painter’s tape
• Scotch tape

The first step is to print out your tree. I used The Rasterbator to transform my tree template into a huge, rasterized image of my tree in easily-printable PDF format. You can adjust the size of the image to fit your wall space; mine came out at 30 pages, measuring about 40″x60″. Make sure to follow the instructions on the website for best printed results.

Once you have printed out the tree, lay out the pages on the floor so you can see how they should be taped together. Trim away the white space from the each pages. Since very few printers can print all the way to the edge of the paper, all the pages will have some white space on the edges. The pages that have interior tree segments should be trimmed with care because the edges need to match up when you tape them together. The edge pages can be trimmed a little less tediously, because a little extra white space on the edge isn’t so noticeable once it’s on the wall.

Once each page is trimmed, the tree is ready to assemble. Piece the tree together upside down on the floor, then tape the edges together. I found that I had to use quite a bit of tape to get the edges to line up nicely and not show the wall through the final picture, but there’s probably a better way that I didn’t think of. Tape was easy to use, and I had it on hand. Either painter’s tape or scotch tape would be fine for this image because the whole thing is dark, but I’ve taped rasterbated images together with painter’s tape before and been sorry later because the blue tape showed through the white parts of the image.

Use painter’s tape to mount the assembled tree on the wall. I had to use painter’s tape because my dorm won’t let me use anything else on the walls, but other means of adhesion probably would have worked just as well. Make sure you mount it near an electrical outlet so you can plug in the lights. Next, using clear scotch tape, starting at the top, tape the Christmas tree lights on the tree, winding your way down until you get to the bottom. I liked the clear tape because it blends in pretty well, but I had to use a lot of it because it doesn’t stick terribly well. Make a paper star to tape on top and stick it up there.

I think the final result looks pretty nifty. We put ours about a foot above the floor and over a little bench so we could put presents underneath. It won’t fool anyone during the day, but at night with the colored lights on the effect is rather striking. It would also look pretty cool with paper ornaments taped on.

I say it’s a dorm-style tree, but it would be great for anyone living in an apartment, condo, or other small space. It’s also quite a bit cheaper than buying a real tree for me, because I have a quota with my college’s printing system that I haven’t maxed out yet. I’m not sure if printing 30 color pages would have been more expensive than a real tree if I had to pay for the ink myself. It’s certainly cheaper once you factor in the cost of ornaments.

If anyone else tries this out, I’d love to hear about it!