▲ 9 points

Ask HN: What do you wish you had purchased when you still had student discounts?

by anderspitman·9y ago·10 comments·view on hn ↗

I suspect I could be taking much better advantage of being a student. For example, I want to get into FPGA development eventually. I don't have time at the moment (because I'm a student), but I've heard there are some excellent discounts for boards. What products, services, conferences, etc offer a really good deal for students?

10 comments

If anything, I wish I had refinanced my student loans. I remember paying 6% or 7% for them in interest every month. It took me 2 years and I was sending both of my paychecks towards them every month, living on very little money. Plenty of companies will happily buy your debt and give you below 5% rate if you have decent credit.

I certainly did take advantage of an Apple discount though, at the time, it was way better than it is today. It was 2009 when I bought a Macbook. They gave me a printer, an iPod Touch, and $100 in Apple credit which I applied towards the computer. I think I also opened a credit account with them which took off 10% more from the total price.

Sold the printer for $100, sold the iPod for $250.

So a $1500 laptop ended up costing me $1200ish with tax.

I think they have since changed all that and give you a $100 discount.

Get the GitHub Student Pack, if you haven't already.

It isn't a lot but free is free.

https://education.github.com/pack

I have; good stuff

MS Office

edit: and Adobe stuff like Photoshop and Illustrator

+1 on MS Office - also check if your university has some contracts in place to allow you to use certain licenses for free. You can enable those just before you are graduating.

Yeah this has definitely been nice.

Once you graduate and get a job, the marginal value of a dollar will be a lot less. Having missed out on some piddly student discount won't matter to you.

Doesn't really count as I did get one, but Apple used to give a decent discount and the three year warranty was also heavily discounted.

CAD and CAE packages like SolidWorks, Ansys and so on, maybe?

Unfortunately I believe SolidWorks is only available for certain engineering majors, not CS students. But I just found out yesterday that apparently I have access to the entire Autodesk suite.