Depends on your uses mostly. I'm an electrical engineering student myself, though I'm focusing on computer engineering side. I have 3 laptops that I use. I m

Depends on your uses mostly. I'm an electrical engineering student myself, though I'm focusing on computer engineering side. I have 3 laptops that I use. I mostly use my Acer C720 Chromebook with crouton installed to dual boot Ubuntu. Cost me $105, has an 8 hour battery life, is light like a feather, and has been able to throw everything I throw at it so far. Even with 2 gigs of ram, I can open up dozens of tabs. (I have 25 open on chrome right now with no slowdown). The storage space is a bit low at 16gb, but its an easy upgrade to a bigger one, 128 or 256gb is very affordable now (m.2 ssd only). The i3 version with 4 gigs of ram is probably more than enough for your classes. I highly recommend it. My other laptops is a Lenovo Y500 which is a powerhouse. I use it mostly for gaming and windows dev. Its shortcoming is that the battery life is 2.5 hours, which is understandable since it has SLI graphic cards and a i7 HQ model. The current version of this is the Y50, which packs a GTX 960M, which is great if you're a gamer as well, though don't expect battery to be better than 4 hours or so. My last laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad X61t. Like other users suggested, used Thinkpads are some of the best value in computing. I spent 120 for this one, and it has a built in wacom digitizer, 4 gigs of ram, and a core 2 duo. It is noticeably slower than my chromebook, but thats probably because I'm running windows on it instead of Ubuntu. I can highly recommend getting a thinkpad and making some upgrades, namely an SSD and maybe a ram upgrade. They're sturdy like tanks so you don't have to worry about damaging them.