I love being a student.

bentomo

Frequent Poster
Now that I have an email for the university of minnesota I get free TI regulators legitimately. Yay for being a poor college student now!

(to make this more relevant this is a PSA telling everyone that school emails get you free TI regulators free since they changed their policy)

What's your favorite part of being a college student?
 
This changes everything. I thought I was doomed to having to pay for samples for the rest of my days. Neato find, Ben :)
 
bic said:
You can also get legit copies of Microsoft software dirt cheap.
Dat.

I was very jealous 3 years ago when my brother went to school and he got a copy of windows for $30.
 
My favorite part of college was the $3 all you can drink keg parties, and seeing how many girls I could get to take their shirts off for me in one night. :D

Seriously though, free stuff rocks. I just paid $35 for a TI regulator I needed for my PS2 project. Luckily, I've found regulators similar to the ones we normally use for GC's for a fraction of the cost of TI ones. I knew they'd catch on eventually, Playstations.
 
I never got anything for free but I did once *Can'tSayThisOnTV* some broad in the library.

Actually wait, I got a copy of Ubuntu on a CD-R
 
bic said:
You can also get legit copies of Microsoft software dirt cheap.

This. I have also gotten discounts on other things, but never thought of electronic components before. Then again I have never wanted anything that expensive from a manufacturer.

Can't you take advantage of the free samples manufacturers give? Or do they require proper business addresses? I have never used them but always wondered.
 
Other cool thing- you can usually get free or super cheap versions of software. Granted most of what I have experience with is probably stuff you wouldn't use, but...

Examples:

QNX Neutrino RTOS and dev environment (useful for embedded stuff)

ModelSim HDL environment and simulator (for VHDL and Verilog)

Microsoft Student (Office for $99, Visual Studio Pro for free- unless your school has MSDN Academic Alliance, in which case you get a lot more free stuff)

Plus many hardware manufacturers offer significantly reduced prices for students. I needed a JTAG programmer one time and it was around $500... or if you're a student, $60.

Bottom line is, manufacturers and software companies want you to learn their stuff so when you're eventually at a company and need to make a recommendation on a purchase, you can be like "Oh yeah, I am totally familiar with Xilinx FPGAs and ModelSim, we should buy a lot of (licenses for) those!"

For the record though, Adobe student licensing offers steep discounts but on already god-awfully expensive software. CS 6 Master collection is discounted almost 70%! Yeah, because it's $2600 normally. Don't pay $800.
 
Oh hey, I've got one of those .edu address thingies. I should use that. I wish I could get a student discount on steam though.
 
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