I repectfully disagree with the mainstream in general, and with Maleficent in particular. You DONT NEED "the best laptop." You DONT NEED a graphics card. (The on-board graphics will work just fine.) You WILL NEED at least 1T of disc space, and at least 32G of memory, preferably more, and really as much as you can afford. A celeron processor will be fine. Let me say that again: A celeron processor will be just fine. The "dot edu" institutions are hell bent to overspec computer equipment, upon the theory that you can never go wrong by over-specing something. By the time you realize its overspeced, you're a senior on your way out the door, and you wont care. You can IMHO easily get by with a 600 laptop, an Acer or Asus is fine, Hp is "ok" I suppose, I steer clear of everything else. Put money into large disks and Big Memory. Dont put money into hi-res gaming oriented displays, or gaming oriented features. A small on-board disk can be easily supplemented with a USB disk pretty cheaply, but memory is another story. Max out on the memory. It doesnt sound very sexy I know, but memory will help you a whole lot more over 4 years than a Ryzen display. Asus and Acers hold up fine in my opinion, but if they should happen to crap out on you, remember you can buy two of them for your budgeted purchase price.