Fountains pens are nice if you write by hand a lot. When I was taking humanities classes, I would get assigned 30 page of readings a week -- which meant a ton

Fountains pens are nice if you write by hand a lot. When I was taking humanities classes, I would get assigned 30 page of readings a week -- which meant a ton of summarizing and note taking. I started out using a ballpoint pen, but I would get tired after a few pages of writing. I decided to invest in a fountain pen, which allowed me to write with a lighter grip. It was a quality of life improvement. It made writing feel pleasurable (similar to how I feel when I see the PDF produced by a LaTeX file). I started with a $15 Japanese Pilot Metropolitan (not a good pen IMO, the fine nib was too scratchy for me) but eventually moved to a $30 Taiwanese TWSBI ECO and nowadays my go-to is a $30 German Lamy Safari. ($200 pens are a luxury; the sweet spot is ~$30; also Western pens and Asian pens are different in their nib sizing). Those of you who are using BiC pens -- you can do so much better. However, I will admit that gel pens come pretty close, so if you don't care for fountain pens, gel pens should be your go to.