Anonymous asked: When do you suggest buying the "required" books for classes? I know that some classes sometimes just use powerpoints and what not so would it be best to just wait till the beginning of quarter or buy them now?

Hi! I’m not sure if you’re a UCD student, but I’ll assume you are, although this should work for most anyone :) Wall of text ahead, bear with me~ gdi i talk too much :|

To answer your question up front… there’s really no right answer! I like being prepared so I try to get my stuff ahead of time, but over the years I’ve found some tricks to make sure I’m not buying anything unnecessary.

First, I’d suggest checking your professor’s entry on ratemyprofessor! Some professors only test on material from lecture; others like to pull stuff from the textbooks in addition to what they discuss in class (which is a royal pain and probably what you’re most worried about). Either way, students will usually have something to say about the prof’s teaching style. If that’s not enough info, try checking your class website/logging into smartsite to see if they’ve posted the syllabus; again, look to see where material for tests is coming from.

If you’re still not certain if it’s worth it to buy a book, thankfully most textbooks are listed on reserve at Shields; take a look here to see if yours are. You can sign out a book for about 2 hours, and you can do it over indefinitely unless someone else has requested it. The only caveat is that there aren’t a lot of copies to go around most of the time, and you can bet that someone else in your class will probably be trying this as well. Regardless, try it out for a week or two to see if the text is worth buying! :)

A quick aside science majors taking the CHE 2 series: I believe the lab manuals are online as free PDFs. Save yourself a trip to the bookstore (although you still have to get the lab notebook)!

Edit: I forgot to add that you can rent textbooks @ the bookstore if you’re only using them for a quarter or so!

Let me know if this is helpful, or if you’re unclear about anything! If anyone has any other, better suggestions I’m all ears! :)