As the current owner of a desktop and the past owner of a laptop, I figured I should take this. The easy answer is that there are pros and cons for either, but here’s how I see it:

Laptop -

• Small, portable, makes it easy to work with friends/do your work anywhere
• Useful for the vast majority of the tasks you’d need as a college student - word processing, internetting, FarmVille or what-have-you
• Not great if you feel like doing heavy duty gaming or stuff like that (but then, there’s the option of consoles as well)

Desktop -

• Lots of computing power, can just DO a lot more than laptops can
• Clunky, will affect how you arrange your room
• Can’t work around your friends as much (unless you all work in your room) :(

So, yeah. I’m really happy with my desktop, but I miss having a laptop that I could carry around wherever I go. I would say, for an incoming freshman, a laptop is your best bet - it’s got everything you need, is a significantly smaller investment (in most cases), and it’s nice and compact. I should also mention that we have a good amount of computing facilities on campus - the computer center, the Pod (which has access to the Adobe suite, among other animation/editing software), and a few more specialized labs for things like video and photo editing. So, if you’re worried about being able to do those kinds of things on a laptop, don’t be!

Hope that helped!

-Evan ‘13