Let’s kick off the list with an absolute essential. As I write this post I’m sat here with my Bose headphones on (these ones), to me they’re the perfect combination of comfort and sound quality, an absolute essential that neither of us could live with out.

We are very much Bose fan boys but we realise that they are a little on the expensive side for a student budget. But there’s plenty of other brands out there that sell quality headphones, it’s well worth investing though. We recommend spending above £40 to get you a good set (take a look at these). Whether you like it or not there’s going to be many hours spent in the library (at 3am) writing those dissertations and believe us headphones are an absolute must.

We were always those kids that had to have Parker fountain pens at school then we became teenagers where finding a pen in the depths of our bags was a tricky job. But since we’ve grown up a good set of stationery is a must. It doesn’t have to be anything big, on a daily basis we carry the essentials which to us are a Parker ball point pen (personalised of course get yours here), mechanical pencil (we love the Pentel P200) and a scalpel (not applicable to everyone of course). Having those few essentials as a student will be more important than you can ever imagine.

A MacBook has always been at the top of every students wish list but some students simply don’t need them. But if you’re just about to start a creative course they are the number one must buy. Don’t get us started on the new MacBook Pros (although we have just purchased 2 of them) but they are still number one simply because of OSX (keep an eye out for our full review coming soon).

Our advice would be to stretch your budget as far as you can, it works out more economical in the long run. Let me explain, if you buy the base model it will last about 6 months before you run out of storage and the RAM gets fed up of running the full Adobe Creative Suite. You have two options you deal with it and live off hard drives and bury your face into a pillow every time it crashes or you go out and purchase the MacBook Pro you should have brought in the first place. Your choice.

So you’ve just got yourself a fresh new MacBook Pro only to find that you can’t plug anything in, what you’re going to need is a shed load of adapters and cables. This is where a Cable Tidy Bag comes in, we purchased this one off amazon for a bargain £6.99, all in the name of research of course and it’s alright to be fair. It stores plenty of stuff, fits comfortably into another bag, it’s well built and should protect the contents. Even without a MacBook Pro this is still a good purchase we’re all guilty of having a tangle of cables at the bottom of our bags.

It’s every student’s worst nightmare, it’s deadline day and your files have corrupted or your laptops been stolen. We’ve all been there and there’s nothing worse. Although most people use cloud storage these days (we can’t recommend Dropbox enough) it’s still nice to have a ‘hard copy’ so to speak.

The price of storage has dropped massively over the last few years so there’s no excuse. We’re currently running Western Digital My Passport 1TB Hard drives and they do the job at an amazing price of just over £50 you couldn’t ask for more. They’re reliable, hard wearing and although not as fast as an SSD they’re still quite quick.

Although if you deal with a lot of very big video files we would recommend spending the extra money and getting an SSD. The new T5 SSD from Samsung is an absolute beast being able to transfer 540MB per second, although we would expect those kinds of speeds if we were spending £189.95 for a 500GB hard drive.