College is not an easy part of life. Sure, you get to meet new people, make new friends, and go to places you probably weren’t able to go to in your high school years. Sadly, stress is also tied to college life, and if you’re a college student you probably already know that life as a young adult is not all fun and games.
Technology to some degree can make students life easier since a plethora of academic resources are available on the internet, not to mention the fact that majority of schools are slowly integrating online classes into their curriculum. And with the COVID-19 pandemic prevalent at the moment, online classes have become more significant.
That being said, a laptop is undoubtedly essential for college students since they can use it to write research papers, review, and attend online classes virtually anywhere with an internet connection. Life as a college student would be harder without the use of a laptop, but is it really necessary for students to own a gaming laptop, or would any laptop do fine, so long as they can use it for school purposes?
We must consider how video games help students perform academically. If you are a college student, you’ve probably experienced burn-out a couple of times. Whether it is due to academic pressure, pressure in your social life, or the anxiety brought upon by not being to balance academic and social life, you’ve probably already felt like giving up once or twice.
Video games can help us maintain a social life without having to physically interact with anyone else. Studies have shown that kids who played video games every day have higher increased odds of high intellectual functioning and increased odds of overall competence, not to mention that they seemed to have less relationship issues with peers.
Playing games moderately has also been shown to reduce stress, which will oftentimes reduce time spent on overthinking and more time for students to focus studying.
But what if I don’t play online games? What good would a laptop made to play games on do to me? Well, unlike the name implies, a gaming laptop isn’t just created specifically for gaming. Gaming laptops almost always come with good quality GPU and processors which can be used for editing videos and graphic designing, just to name a few of its features.
Students can find freelance jobs in video editing and graphic designing respectively and for most a gaming laptop is essential for performing such tasks since they are able to generally handle more information compared to regular laptops, which also equates to a faster computer.
Gaming laptops also don’t get outdated as quickly as regular laptops since they were built for the purpose of being able to run the games and programs of tomorrow, so in a sense it is an investment, since you won’t have to buy a new laptop every couple of years.
So now that we’ve talked about the good effects of moderately playing video games and all the cool things about a gaming laptop, should you get one for college?
It depends. Good gaming laptops tend to be around $700 and above, for those of us that don’t have that kind of budget to spend on an electronic device, maybe buying a gaming laptop isn’t really a good idea.
Aside from that, cheap non-gaming laptops will usually be able to perform the essential functions that a college student would need to make learning simpler, like accessing the internet for editing and writing research papers, albeit it will perform slower as compared to a gaming laptop.
If you are a college student reading this article, I’ll leave the decision to you, gamer or not. Ultimately, if playing video games help you in dealing and coping with the stressful college life, by all means buy a high-end laptop that can run games smoothly.
If you don’t really play video games and see a regular non-gaming laptop as enough to get through college and do academic works such as research papers, that’s fine too. In choosing what kind of laptop you are going to buy, always consider how you are going to use it. A good laptop will make college life easier, but it is not really necessary.
