
Ask HN: What do you wish you had purchased when you still had student discounts? - anderspitman
I suspect I could be taking much better advantage of  being a student. For example, I want to get into FPGA development eventually. I don&#x27;t have time at the moment (because I&#x27;m a student), but I&#x27;ve heard there are some excellent discounts for boards. What products, services, conferences, etc offer a really good deal for students?
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mattbgates
If anything, I wish I had refinanced my student loans. I remember paying 6% or
7% for them in interest every month. It took me 2 years and I was sending both
of my paychecks towards them every month, living on very little money. Plenty
of companies will happily buy your debt and give you below 5% rate if you have
decent credit.

I certainly did take advantage of an Apple discount though, at the time, it
was way better than it is today. It was 2009 when I bought a Macbook. They
gave me a printer, an iPod Touch, and $100 in Apple credit which I applied
towards the computer. I think I also opened a credit account with them which
took off 10% more from the total price.

Sold the printer for $100, sold the iPod for $250.

So a $1500 laptop ended up costing me $1200ish with tax.

I think they have since changed all that and give you a $100 discount.

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madamelic
Get the GitHub Student Pack, if you haven't already.

It isn't a lot but free is free.

[https://education.github.com/pack](https://education.github.com/pack)

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anderspitman
I have; good stuff

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BorisMelnik
MS Office

edit: and Adobe stuff like Photoshop and Illustrator

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patrics123
+1 on MS Office - also check if your university has some contracts in place to
allow you to use certain licenses for free. You can enable those just before
you are graduating.

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SamReidHughes
Once you graduate and get a job, the marginal value of a dollar will be a lot
less. Having missed out on some piddly student discount won't matter to you.

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iSloth
Doesn't really count as I did get one, but Apple used to give a decent
discount and the three year warranty was also heavily discounted.

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DrNuke
CAD and CAE packages like SolidWorks, Ansys and so on, maybe?

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anderspitman
Unfortunately I believe SolidWorks is only available for certain engineering
majors, not CS students. But I just found out yesterday that apparently I have
access to the entire Autodesk suite.

