<p>Hopefully i'll be getting a summer job soon and need to know what is the recommended amount of money I should save up in order to purchase books for my first year of college.</p>
<p>Also what is a recommended place to go to in order to purchase books?I hear on-campus book stores are a ripoff.</p>
<p>It depends on how many classes you plan to take and whether your professors assign editions that were just released. I’d say $60 per book is a reasonable starting point.</p>
<p>Unless you plan on making major changes to your schedule during the first week, buying used books online is much better than buying from your on-campus bookstore.</p>
<p>It depends but generally speaking, save at least $1,000 for books/yr.</p>
<p>My first semester I spent about $400 on books (most were used) from the bookstore.</p>
<p>I now use half.com, amazon, and chegg.com</p>
<p>Most I’ve spent since that first semester was $150 and thats because one of the books had just come out, so I needed to buy new.</p>
<p>I’m a science major.</p>
<p>varies heavily on the books that are assigned…</p>
<p>$500/semester should be enough most of the time.</p>
<p>Question regarding this: my school only does registration a week before classes start. Should I anticipate/guess what classes I’ll be taking and so save money by buying books earlier or wait to by at my school’s extremely expensive bookstore?</p>
<p>Depends how smart you are when buying them.</p>
<p>If you buy them directly from the school, be prepared to drop $400 and up depending on the class.</p>
<p>If you shop around, purchase used from say Amazon, eBay/half or other textbook sellers, you could easily get your books for under $200</p>
<p>I’ve always waited until my classes started to see what books I needed (most profs here didn’t put it up on their website).</p>
<p>I just spend the first week without books and catch up (which isn’t much here). The one exception was physics (had hwk in the book), but all the profs here have books on reserve at the library, so I just used the reserve book for physics, and would have for any other class if I needed to.</p>
<p>I usually break even after buying books online for ~half the price of a new one and sell it back online for about the same price a semester or year later. Sometimes I even sell it to the campus bookstore if they’re paying half back for a used book.</p>
<p>Unless I decide to keep the books, then I obviously lose money.</p>
<p>It depends on your major, too. I (over)budget about $1,000 a year because I have some semesters where all of my books, even purchased used, can come up to $400 or $500 simply due to the amount of books I’m required to have. I also have had several courses where some of my books were imports, meaning I had to pay extra for those. $1,000 will probably be more than you need most semesters, but it’s good to have that cushion available.</p>
<p>Alright thanks guys for the help so far. If for some reason I dont reach my mark can I use some of my financial aid money to help pay for them?</p>
<p>btw i’m a history major so I would imagine I would be nearly as expensive as someone majoring in sciences or engineering since, going by some of the books my government and latin teacher have, we use direct sources.</p>
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<p>Depends on your aid and how it’s disbursed. At my first college (I’m a transfer), I could do that really easily - the campus bookstore had all financial aid students on file, and we could apply our aid in-store - but at my current college, I wasn’t offered that option due to the way my aid package is set up. I would say that, generally speaking, you can do it, but there might be exceptions.</p>
<p>Also, I’m a social sciences interdisciplinary major, and my books are way more expensive than most of my friends in the sciences because we use so many of them. I had one history course in the fall that all on its own cost me more than $450 (yes, used) because we had more than a dozen books and a bunch of imports, so I was so grateful for that cushion I’d built in.</p>
<p>“Depends on your aid and how it’s disbursed. At my first college (I’m a transfer), I could do that really easily - the campus bookstore had all financial aid students on file, and we could apply our aid in-store - but at my current college, I wasn’t offered that option due to the way my aid package is set up. I would say that, generally speaking, you can do it, but there might be exceptions.”</p>
<p>Alright ill ask the school.</p>
<p>"
Also, I’m a social sciences interdisciplinary major, and my books are way more expensive than most of my friends in the sciences because we use so many of them. I had one history course in the fall that all on its own cost me more than $450 (yes, used) because we had more than a dozen books and a bunch of imports, so I was so grateful for that cushion I’d built in."</p>
<p>Was this class upper-level?</p>
<p>^^ that true?</p>
<p>I’m planning on double majoring in history and anthroplogy.</p>
<p>Does anyone know a good website to order from?</p>
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<p>200-level, so not really. Obviously it’s outside the norm, but it just goes to show that things like that can happen, so always overbudget just in case.</p>
<p>“I’m planning on double majoring in history and anthroplogy.”</p>
<p>Awesome, what are you planning on doing afterwards?</p>
<p>“200-level, so not really. Obviously it’s outside the norm, but it just goes to show that things like that can happen, so always overbudget just in case.”</p>
<p>Alright thanks.</p>