<p>How much did you spend for books in total for freshman year by using discounts and getting them from upperclassmen?</p>
<p>depends on what type of courses you are taking. if you’re premed youre books are going to be bigger and more of them will be hardcover- so more expensive. my friends who are english majors or similar majors do not pay as much.</p>
<p>i’d say average is around 300-600 though. </p>
<p>also depends on how you buy them. examples: through the bookstore, upperclassmen, ebay, etc etc</p>
<p>It really depends on your classes & the books required by those profs. My D got by spending less than $200/semester a couple times … she searches dealoz.com & buys used. This past semester she had a ridiculous number of books to buy, and one or two were new. Between coupons at borders.com, used books, and a couple purchased in the Vandy bookstore (used, I believe), she spent maybe $350.</p>
<p>I’m going to be doing chemical engineering, if that helps. So, do you recommend that I put 1000 or 500 on the Commodore Card for all of the expenses (including books) first semester? I really don’t think I’ll spend much at all, but you never now.</p>
<p>I put in $1500 first semester and it was way too much for me, so I didn’t add any second semester, and will not add any next year. I also found it way cheaper to buy books from half.com, ebay, amazon used, etc; I only really used the bookstore for hard-to-find books, last-minute supplies, and Vandy gear…and I still have $950+ left on my card after the end of freshman year.</p>
<p>I think you’ll be fine with either option;
If you do $500 and find it’s not enough, you can easily add money to the card or order books online with a credit card then pick them up at the bookstore.
If you do $1000 and you don’t use up much of it, just select $0 for second semester; the money will carry over for all four years.</p>
<p>Chemical Engineering means that you will be taking at least CHEM 102a and MATH 115a your first semester. Those are very expensive books by themselves. If you want to use the most convenient method of just buying the bookstore bundle, I would budget $400 for those two books alone. However, you can save some money by do some digging around to see if you need the bookstore bundle. That way you can buy the books online ahead of time for much less money.</p>
<p>i bought entirely new books. i spent about $400 each semester.</p>
<p>You will most likely spend more money on books freshman year vs. other years because the Chemistry and Math books are quite pricey. I would definitely recommend using Half.com because you can find really good deals on there. However, you have to be careful when ordering books for some classes because the Vandy Bookstore sells the books in bundles with other required materials such as online homework codes and clickers and those are hard to get online. Just a word of caution. If you do a little bit of searching you can save a lot of money. Also sell your books online, you’ll get more money for them. The bookstore is a rip-off.</p>
<p>D has a summer job in the bookstore doing textbook buyback inventory and cataloguing. She has told me that the savings on used books there do not seem to be that great in her opinion compared to new. She only gets a 10% discount working there and I get the same discount as a Vanderbilt employee.</p>