Between tuition and textbooks, being a student can cost a lot. But there are some companies offering benefits only to students. It can be their marketing effort trying to entice you to their products early on so you use them after school, but if they are standard in your industry there might be no harm in trying them out.
Let’s find out where the deals are.
Apple, not known for cutting down prices on their products, offers discounts to students and their parents. While back-to-school campaigns provide the best deal, there are some student discounts going on year-round on Apple’s education website that you might not be able to find at other retail outlets.
To start off, there’s a full laptop available at a slight discount, a basic model 13-inch MacBook Air for $1,129, discounted from $1,199.
While the hardware discount is not big, one particular offer that I like is a creative software bundle that might be helpful for photography/videography students. You can get the Pro Apps Bundle for Education (includes Final Cut Pro X, Logic Pro X, and others) for $259.99. Final Cut Pro X alone is regularly $399.99.
Speaking of art students, the popular multimedia suite Adobe Creative Cloud also offers a 60-percent discount on its products, which include Photoshop and Premiere Pro. You can get the full Creative Cloud suite of apps for $19.99 a month USD, discounted from $52.99.
Microsoft has the Office Home and Student 2019 version available for $169. But, as a Camosun student, you don’t even have to pay the discounted price—it’s offered for free through the college. All you need to do is to sign up at camosun.ca/office365 with your student ID. Through this, you can use a full version (not a function-limiting trial version) of all Office suite programs.
Microsoft also offers a student discount of up to 10 percent on their store site. Some of the items available there are Surface laptop-tablet hybrids and Xbox game consoles.
If you are working to become a software developer, GitHub, a popular source code repository service, offers hosts of free services in its Student Developer Pack, including free private repositories and free services from other tech companies.
Apple Music and Spotify also offer 50-percent discounts on their memberships for students. If you shop online, you can get a 50-percent discount on Amazon Prime membership, which gives you free two-day delivery on most of its products and other benefits.