People who are in the first year in the college are entering a life filled with adult responsibility and independence. They are required to accountable just like any adult. There are many things that need to take care of and understanding proper technology implementation could make their lives much easier. As an example, many students are being targeted by phishing and it is one of the most destructive security risks. Phishing is essentially a scamming attempt that tries to dupe email users into revealing their confidential and personal information. The gathered data can be manipulated illicitly by scammers. Because new students are not yet aware about many online services used in the college, they can be more easily fooled by fake websites that visually looks identical with real websites.
In reality, they could reveal their university accounts and financial data. In this case, new students should be particularly vigilant. They must be cautious and prevent giving our essential personal information. Our firewall and antivirus software should be kept up to date. Email address should be checked to see whether it matches with the one used by the college. The URL could appear similar to the university’s or financial institution’s website, but it is actually a sub-domain of an unknown, random primary domain name. When we receive a seemingly legit email, it is important to be careful when clicking on the e-mail address. It is possible that we will end up automatically downloading a malicious file.
When visiting any website, it is important to check for any security certificate, especially before we enter our critical information. We should also check with older students to make sure that we are using the right website address. There are other technology considerations that freshmen should think about. As an example, they should bring the right type of electronic accessories and appliances. There are items that they could bring, such as laser printer, various extension cords, replacement printer cartridges and others. It should be noted that some items, such as laser toner cartridge only has about one year of shelf life. More and more learning material is available in digital form, so it is a good idea to have a portable tablet as well. For light computing requirements, many students could bring only a tablet, instead of laptops. Regardless, tablets will never replace a fully-featured laptop, so students with limited budget should prioritize on buying a laptop first.
The dorm room is usually equipped with wireless network, so it is important for students to take advantage of it. Fortunately, even the most low-end devices are already equipped with at least WiFi support. It means that smartphones, tablets and laptops can be connected easily to the WiFi network. However, not every room in the dorm has equal wireless network signal. If it is difficult to ask for the dorm administrator to address this issue, we may need to share the cost of purchasing and installing an additional router with roommates.