B-School Supplies?

Some gadgets that could be helpful:

Livescribe Pulse Pen - 4GB ~$170, 2GB ~$120. Pen records while you write, and you can play back from any point in the recording by tapping on that word. (Extra notebooks ~$5 each).

Wireless Presenter with Laser - ~$30. Some of these even have timers that will vibrate when you have 5 minutes left, etc.

A Good, High speed, Color Laser Printer for Home - ~$250.

You don't need a color printer. (per say) If you need to print in color, you can probably use the one at school. But do get one of those Wireless All-in-One Printer/Scanner/Copier thingy. Makes your life easier. And be aware of cost of ink cartridges…… They cost me an arm and a leg.....

financial calculator is necessary for finance and accounting classes. You can wait on buying those. Most people use TI BAII but some professors recommend HP (which I have no idea how to use)

Get a mobile laptop with light weight and long battery (and really comfortable keyboard)...you will need it a lot. And no...you don't need the one with ridiculous processing power.

Get a USB drive (4GB+ in size) if you don't already own one

Go on a trip before bschool. You will need it before school work overwhelms your life

Enjoy the sunlight....some days I don't get to see it...

Go buy one of those industrial paper hole punchers. i have one that punches up to 35 pgs at a time. You will need it (we kill a lot of trees in bschool)

Start working out in anticipation of carrying a heavy backpack or messenger bag with all your books, laptop and stuff. Bschools have a locker but you still need to carry things during the day

If you are a bad dancer, get some dancing lessons.....I forgot how bad of a dancer I was until I got drunk and forgot that I didn't dance in public

If you are shy, do things that you wouldn't normally do when you get to bschool. (attend more social outings that you wouldn't normally go to, initiate conversation with a stranger before they initiate the conversation etc). Bschool experience is about transformation, among many other things. If you are not open to evolving as a person, then you are probably wasting next 2 years of your life.

Oh, and don't forget to bring yourself to the bschool. You are unique and just be yourself. Afterall, bschools admitted you based on who you were, who you are, and who you will be in the future. Your future classmates should have the honor and the privilege of meeting you just the way you are.

I don't think Staples sells all that stuff, nink, but good advice nonetheless.

From my experience, hold off on buying a dedicated financial calculator. In all of my finance, stats or other quant classes so far we've been able to use Excel for any calculation more complicated than an iPhone can handle, even on exams.

I'd agree on the printer, we have unlimited printing available at school, but it's been pretty convenient being able to print out assignments or other stuff at home.

Ditto on the USB drive, mine have gotten a pretty good workout. If you're smart about which company presentations you attend you can probably pick a couple up (I've managed to accumulate 3 new 1GB ones compliments of recruiters).

I'd also recommend an external HDD to back up your data from your laptop. You don't want to be the guy that loses his paper/Excel model/etc because you dropped your laptop.

Also, if you don't already have one, pick up a good, easy to use, compact digital camera. These are going to be some of the best years of your life and you're going to want to have pictures of it.

I concur with Nomad83's suggestion for the Livescribe SmartPen. It records all your notes and lectures and syncs the two. It is very handy when you can't figure out what the heck your notes mean. You simply click and hear what the prof was saying when you wrote them. Amazing.

Also, you can archive all your notes and have them as a PDF years from now. I got mine at the Penn bookstore but everyone (including Amazon) carries it now).