- Glue sticks (at least three for the year)
- Ballpoint pens
- No. 2 pencils
- Box of tissues
- A large pink eraser
- Water-based markers
- Spiral-bound or composition notebooks
- Bourbon (at least three bottles per quarter)
- No-Doze and Redbull
- Flash drive
- Box of tissues
- Portable stapler (because none of your students will ever think to bring their own or to staple their own essays, ever)
- Uncrushable sense of purpose
More seriously, though, I can’t think of what sort of supplies are necessary for grad school. Rifling through the department’s supply cabinet for various cheap-but-fun office supplies is one of the perks, of course, and I can’t think of anything that grad students, those eager beavers that they are, wouldn’t already be fondling and drooling over and buying too much of without my sage advice. (come on, how many grad students in English only buy the required textbooks and can get out of the bookstore without grabbing at least a few extra “ooh, how cool! I must read this!” type of things?)
Likewise I think the people I know are all such nerds that we like to go out to stationery stores and paw through all the cute notebooks and gel pens and whatnot (I just bought some new ones to reward me for writing). And everybody has trouble getting out of the House of Crack alive!
Mmmm, shiny deliciousness. I must need a new PDA to be all organized and shiny and such. Perhaps the best advice to new grad students would be to not buy all the cool shininess and to make a budget instead?
So, you tell me: what essential back-to-grad-school supplies am I missing? What will the incoming grad students need that they don’t know about yet? Or, alternately, you could add to the Surviving-the-Transition list above.