<p>I'm looking over my daughter's official award letter, and on the back it states other costs not billed. One of them is house dues. Just to be prepared, about how much are house dues a year? I'm sure it varies from house to house, but I'd like to have a rought idea. Thanks.</p>
<p>The fact that my D didn’t ask us to pay her back for them tells me they weren’t to high 
Our biggest extra cost were books since they can’t get them advance for first semester so she basically had to rely on the bookstore.</p>
<p>I <em>think</em> my house’s was $10/semester for all four years. I even was treasurer, and I can’t remember. In my house, if you couldn’t pay you could just tell the treasurer quietly and it didn’t matter - but this is how we supplemented the money we got from the college to buy soap for the bathrooms, hold parties, and plan senior banquet (we had it catered) - and have other smaller house events throughout the year.</p>
<p>For my house first year I believe it was $15/semester.
Second year, it was $10/semester, but $15 if you were late on your payment (late as in… like a month-two months late).</p>
<p>Thanks! I thought it would be much higher, especially since it was listed on the financial aid letter.</p>
<p>Concerning the textbooks, do most first year students buy them at the book store so they have them the first day of classes?</p>
<p>My Daughter bought them after the first day of classes since she wanted to be sure she wasn’t going to drop the classes. Since two wear Science classes with a large text book she did get those at the bookstore. I think we ordered a couple of books from Amazon for her history class since she didn’t need them right away. She ended up doing the same thing second semester since she was on a waiting list for two classes so couldn’t get books in advance. The bookstore had some used books as well and one of the science texts was an online text.</p>
<p>Well, some houses had dues that were twice as much as ours - we debated raising them my senior year because we were in debt from the year before, but decided to be more stringent about allocating funds the next year instead. It varies, but it’s not exorbitant.</p>
<p>I bought my books in a combination of bookstore/online. I looked to see when I would need them - some classes you don’t need certain books for a few weeks (or months) - those I tended to order online more frequently than those I needed for class tomorrow. There are also some books available in the library (both on reserve and not on reserve, depending on how many copies and whether or not the professor bothered to put books on reserve) so sometimes you could make do even longer before your textbooks arrived.</p>
<p>My favorite semester required no textbooks at all. The only class with a text was a German class where we used the same text as the fall semester.</p>
<p>Houses agree on what their dues will be so they vary each year depending on what the house wants to do. And then the dues go towards things like parties, special tea supplies, house trips to Six Flags or other destinations (you can get vans from Smith to drive down there, but you have to pay your own gas), etc. Whatever the House needs. We used most of ours one semester on a board game purchasing extravaganza at Target, because the House really wanted more games to play. I’ve known some houses to spend them on getting a new TV for the living room or something like that. Usually they’re between 10 and 20 dollars, I think 10-15 is pretty normal per semester. </p>
<p>For books, you can definitely get them cheaper online, but for the first semester, I recommend buying used in the campus bookstore simply because it’s easier and first-years change their minds a lot. For the first two weeks she can add and drop classes at will, so it might be a while before she has a solid course schedule. But in that time she’ll still need to be doing assignments and reading for the classes she is in at the time, which requires having books in many cases. And while not always the best deal, the bookstore is easy because it’s right there, she can buy and return as needed, buy the books used, and they’re all sorted by class and section so she won’t accidentally buy the wrong edition and not realize unitl it arrives and have to send it back, etc. </p>
<p>Anything she doesn’t need right away, as others have said, it might just be better to get it online once she’s sure she’s taking that class. But for the most part, I always put convenience to me over saving a few extra bucks at the start of the semester and I always bought my books in the bookstore. I just didn’t want the time and stress of trying to price each book out. Then again, I took mostly humanities courses, so after my first year my books were pretty cheap. First year can be pricey because your classes are often surveys covering a lot of material and you often have to get pricey anthologies or thick science tomes.</p>
<p>House dues in my house were $15/semester and $20 if you were late paying. $15-25 is the norm, but I have heard of some houses (particularly those large enough to host campus-wide parties) having dues as much as $35-40.</p>