<p>Well i’m excited about going to stony brook and just hope to have a few questions answered:</p>
<li><p>i think i read that medical forms have to be submitted before orientation, is that true? i want to receive the meningitis shot but there is no option that says ‘have not received but going to’ in my to do list of Solar. should i just select ‘will not get the shot’? won’t this create confusion later on? Oh and does this have to be checked before May 1st?</p></li>
<li><p>how useful is the school bookstore? i opened one on suggestion of a past graduate (step sis) but only added 200. i hope to go to sites like amazon but for a first year student was that wise? (i read that the plan is changeable in the fist three week?)</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Thanks in advance</p>
<p>Yes, please get the immunizations in before Orientation… it’ll make life easier for you, because you won’t have that hold on your account. It’s okay if you select “won’t get it” and then submit the record later; it’ll just be added to your record at that point. It’s a state regulation, so we have to follow it.</p>
<p>I’ll let students discuss the bookstore; I know you have to at least buy the first-year seminar book there (only $12), but other than that…</p>
<p>Chris</p>
<p>thanks for the quick response but do they also require the</p>
<h1>Authorization for Release of Protected Health Information</h1>
<h1>Notice of Uses and Disclosure of Information</h1>
<h1>Consent for Treatment</h1>
<p>at this time as well of simply the immunization form?</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure your health records have to be completely up to date before you can register for classes.</p>
<p>Or it might before classes start; I’m not sure. I’ll check in the morning and repost.</p>
<p>Chris</p>
<p>The only reason to open a bookstore account is if you have financial aid that covers it and/or you won’t be able to get the money by the time you need books any other way. So if you want to use some of your loan or scholarship money for books but can’t or don’t want to wait for a check to get cut by whatever bureaucracy has the money, a bookstore account is a good idea. If you’ll have book money by the time your tuition payment installments come due but can’t do it up front at the beginning of the semester, a bookstore account might be worth looking into.</p>
<p>Otherwise, HELL NO. Don’t do it. There’s no benefit besides locking $200 into the school bookstore, meaning if there’s something you can’t get there or can get cheaper elsewhere (both are common), you can’t access that money when you need it. I’m not going to do a blanket condemnation of the official campus bookstore; they’re overpriced, annoying, and don’t have great buyback prices, but that’s more or less the situation everywhere. Their only real brick-and-mortar competition is a place by the train station called Stony Books. A lot of people assume Stony Books is always cheaper and the campus bookstore is always an evil money-gouging piece of crap, but the reality is that they’re both evil money-gouging pieces of crap, and assuming Stony Books will always have the better price without actually comparison shopping will waste a lot of money. Sometimes Stony Books is cheaper, but sometimes the campus bookstore is too (there have been a few times where the campus bookstore had a better price than Stony Books by >$10, so while Stony Books’ prices might be better on average, it’s not something you can just assume). The really irritating thing is that while it’s easy to find out what the campus store is charging by either looking online or browsing the shelves, at Stony Books you can’t see prices until you show up with a copy of your schedule and they pull books from the back for you. By the time you have actual numbers to check out, you may have waited for a while and you’re already a step away from the cash register, so you feel more pressured to buy what they put in front of you. It also means you can’t really pick your own used copies (unless you want to send the clerk to the back room over and over again while the people in line behind you glare), which is one of the major benefits to buying in person in the first place. At the campus bookstore you can go through the stack of used books to find the one that barely looks like it’s been touched, or at least has the least irritating highlighting, instead of ending up with the one that someone’s dog gnawed on when the next copy in the pile is pristine. However, Stony Books also often has more used copies than the campus store, so they might have cheaper used books after the official bookstore has run out.</p>
<p>Truly frustrating is that many professors don’t even order their stuff from the campus bookstore, leaving the people who are locked into buying there for whatever reason (financial aid and scholarships, RAs who get bookstore accounts as part of their compensation, etc.) with no choice but to pay out of pocket or wait for the bookstore to order it (usually takes more time than you really have). Professors do it because they think Stony Books is better for students (and maybe Stony Books is better to profs) but it screws people over who rely on financial aid to buy books. Same problem if something is out of stock but your money is tied up in a bookstore account.</p>
<p>So basically, ditch the bookstore account and buy online what you can–that’s almost always the cheapest option by far. If there’s something you need to buy right away because you weren’t sure you needed it until class started and you can’t wait, check the prices at both Stony Books and the campus bookstore.</p>
<p>wow thanks for that great explanation pseudonym. helpful advice. ^^</p>
<p>thanks for the detailed reply pseudonym and sbuadmissions. my sis hasn’t been to SBU for a while so she couldn’t give me any specifics</p>