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Hello,
I’m writing this on a quiet Sunday evening, looking at the pile of cables and gadgets that helped me stumble through four years of engineering school—and wondering how I would have survived without a few of them.
If you’re gearing up for college (or already knee‑deep in assignments) and trying to decide which tech add‑ons are actually worth your limited cash, here’s the short list I kept coming back to.
1. A pair of honest‑to‑goodness noise‑cancelling headphones
Hostel corridors sound a lot like train stations after midnight: doors banging, someone watching reels on full volume, the occasional scooter revving outside.
I bought an entry‑level ANC headset halfway through first semester because I couldn’t focus in that racket, and it paid for itself within a week.
Whether you’re streaming a recorded lecture or blocking out the football commentary next door, silence is a superpower.
I didn’t buy the flagship model everyone raves about; I grabbed something mid‑range, kept the volume sensible, and my concentration skyrocketed. Bonus: overnight bus rides suddenly became nap‑friendly.
2. A chunky power bank (10,000 mAh at the bare minimum)
Picture this: you sprint across campus, reach the library, open your phone to check the assignment brief, and the battery icon is gasping.
Been there more times than I care to admit. A power bank the size of a chocolate bar rode shotgun in my hoodie pocket all year.
It charged my phone, my Bluetooth mouse, and even my friend’s e‑reader during a brutally long lab session.
Go for 20,000 mAh if you’re the “tech support friend”; otherwise, ten will do. Just remember to top it up before exam week, because wall sockets vanish whenever deadlines appear.
3. An external SSD or hard drive for fail‑safe backups
Cloud storage feels convenient… right up to the moment your campus Wi‑Fi decides to nap or your account quota hits 99 percent during finals.
After losing half a design portfolio to a corrupted laptop drive (yes, there were tears), I started backing up to a small 1 TB SSD every Friday night. Takes five minutes, saves five years of sanity.
If your course involves video editing, architecture models, or giant code repos, you’ll thank yourself later. Keep it in a zipped pouch so it doesn’t vanish under dorm clutter.
4. A decent laptop cooling stand or pad
My roommate and I owned identical mid‑tier laptops; by the second year his fan wheezed like an asthmatic hamster while mine still purred.
The difference? A ₹700 cooling stand I’d bought on a whim. Elevating the keyboard a few centimetres improved typing posture and stopped the chassis from cooking itself during marathon CAD sessions.
It’s not glamorous, but neither is losing an assignment to thermal shutdown at 3 a.m. Pick one that tilts gently and runs off a spare USB port—you’ll forget it’s there until the day you lend it to a panicked classmate.
5. A multi‑port USB‑C hub (or plain USB splitter if you’re old‑school)
Universities love projectors from 2010 and lecturers who insist on pen drives. Ultrabooks, on the other hand, love shipping with exactly two ports—one of which is your charger.
A small hub saved me from playing cable musical chairs every time I needed to plug in a mouse, a flash drive, and an external monitor at once.
Extra credit if the hub has SD‑card and HDMI slots; media students, photographers, and presentation junkies will appreciate the flexibility. Keep the cable short so it doesn’t dangle during lectures.
That’s it—five bits of kit that travelled with me from first lecture to last viva. You don’t have to buy everything on day one; start with the accessory that fixes your biggest daily headache and build from there.
If someone had forced me to pick just two, I’d grab the headphones for focus and the power bank for peace‑of‑mind battery life. Everything else can wait until budget (and backpack space) allows.
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