School Supplies

At 8:30 on most any morning last spring, you could find Sarah Heckscher gearing up for another day of high-level learning at Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Heckscher, who graduated this past June, would check the day's mission-critical classes and meetings on her Palm III. She'd then fire up her IBM ThinkPad, log on to the Kellogg Serial (the school's intranet), and download the PowerPoint slides that her technology-strategy professor uploaded the night before. While in class, she'd boot up her ThinkPad and take notes right onto the slides themselves. She could rarely be found without her Palm, her ThinkPad, and her Nokia cell-phone -- all of which provided her with vital links to classmates and to recruiters.

In her two years at Kellogg, Heckscher learned in real time the new rules of surviving and thriving at business school: That you live online and therefore put in a 24-by-7 week. That with data ports scattered all around campus, you can plug in your laptop and work virtually anywhere you want. That because you work on the move -- cross-campus, cross-town, cross-country -- your briefcase must hold all of the tools that you need to do research, to keep pace with your assignments, to partner with your project teams, and to build a network of contacts.

If you're leaving for business school in a few weeks, here's your first lesson: Find the high-tech gadgets that work for you before you head to campus. To give you a head start on packing your briefcase (as well as on finding the right case itself), we talked with hardwired students at Kellogg and three other blue-chip schools: MIT's Sloan School of Management, Harvard Business School, and Stanford Graduate School of Business. Students at these institutions helped us identify the gizmos that will help you keep up with your fast-paced life on campus this fall. Even if you've already snagged an MBA, you'll learn something from the way that today's B-schoolers leverage personal technology. So get the right gear right now, get familiar with it, and you won't have to reboot on your first day of class.

PC Unbound

Thinking about buying a desktop PC for B-school? Forget it. Many first-year students who start with a desktop abandon it for a notebook computer before midterms. "A laptop is all but essential," says Robert Dreyer, who worked at Intel for nearly 12 years before enrolling at Harvard. "I carry my laptop to campus at least three or four times a week. I can't be chained to a desktop."

Almost all work gets done online, and libraries and lecture halls at many schools have T1 lines or ethernet ports. Students can plug in, log on, and get going -- anytime, anywhere.

Most business schools suggest standard configurations for a computer, regardless of its portability. For instance, Stanford recommends that a system packs at least a 266-MHz Pentium Pro or Pentium II processor, 64 MB of ram, a 56-Kbps modem, and a 14-inch screen. But that's the bare minimum. You'll need a machine that's a whiz, not a dullard, so opt for as much computing power as you can afford, such as a 333-MHz Pentium II processor. Heckscher also suggests that incoming students make sure their laptops have an active-matrix display, which has a wider field of view and responds to mouse movements faster than a passive-matrix screen does.

"You'll be working in groups a lot," she says, "and with an active matrix, other people can cluster around your laptop and view the screen from all sides."

At Harvard, Dell portables are a big favorite. Dell can painlessly and powerfully custom-build laptops to a student's specs. The Inspiron 3500 C400GT, for instance, has the clout to keep you multitasking with the best of them. With its 400-MHz Celeron processor and 64 MB of ram, the Inspiron has enough power and memory to open a Web browser to Hoover's Online, to run a statistical model on an Excel spreadsheet, and to download email and attachments from your teammates -- all at once.

If you want to be among the vanguard of cutting-edge student digerati, go for the Toshiba Portégé 3020CT. The Portégé is among the most popular of the new breed of ultrathin, ultraportable laptops. Measuring less than 1-inch thick and weighing an anemic 2.9 pounds, the Portégé comes with a bright 10.4-inch screen and a keyboard that's almost full size, so you can pull an all-nighter without giving yourself a repetitive-stress injury.

Coordinates: $2,486. Dell Inspiron 3500 C400GT, www.dell.com; $1,899. Toshiba Portégé 3020CT, www.csd.toshiba.com