Where are you going to set up your work area? And how will this impact the rest of the household? With dialup connections, the PC is almost always right next to the telephone; with cable broadband, near the TV. Both are very poor choices as you can see. Improvising at the dining room table won’t last long. The height is all wrong, and no dining room chair will be comfortable for extended periods.
You’re going to need space for your books, a printer, and other office supplies – like ink-jet or laser cartridges, paper, file folders, calendar, etc. and a good reading lamp. In short, you need a home office. If you have a spare bedroom, that’s ideal, but you may have to shoehorn something into a few feet in a corner of a room. (I do more printing than most people I know, so I switched to a monochrome laser and cut the cost per page nearly in half over color ink-jet. The trick with either one, though, is to do your printing in batches once every two or three days.)
You can cram in a lot into minimal space with a well-designed computer workstation; or you can buy a folding 5- or 6-foot ‘banquet’ table and an office chair for about the same price. Any of these are much closer to the proper height for keyboarding and reading than your kitchen or dining room table.
Next, you really need a comfortable office chair. I’ve been very satisfied with the one I bought in the middle of the pack as far as features and price. The problem here is that you’ll have to physically go to an office supply to really find an assortment and put each to the test; so much the better if you can buy the same make and model on eBay or amazon or somewhere else cheaper.
My smartest investment was a reading lamp from Ott-Lite. In fact, I was so impressed with the one I originally bought for my piano, that I bought a table model for my desk and a floor model for my favorite reading chair.
All these can break your budget, but they are things you really need and all of them have a service life that should take you beyond undergraduate and graduate school. The real test, though, is whether what you set up makes you eager to go back for your next session because the environment you have set up is pleasant and comfortable, or not.
