My laptop broke halfway through my junior year. It was slow at first, a little bit of flickering on the screen as the computer struggled to breathe. But after a few weeks the laptop couldn’t be on for more than a few minutes without the screen going black. The very intimidating and unhelpful IT desk at my college tole me that I should only expect PCs to last a few years anyways and that it was time to get a new one. Due to my tremendous fear of spending money, I said absolutely not, because it was just the screen that was broken not the computer itself. I borrowed a monitor from a weird computer science major and set up an elaborate desktop arrangement in my dorm room.

The Internet situation in my dorm room was less than ideal. This situation, exacerbated by my lack of a smart phone…