Laptops and Add-Ons at Wellesley

By SARAH CARR

When Claire Ashington-Pickett missed a September concert by the Dave Matthews Band -- one of her favorite groups -- she opted for the next best thing. Using Napster, she downloaded all the songs the group had sung at the concert, and then

ALSO SEE: Campus Newcomers Arrive With More Skill, Better Gear Growing Number of Colleges Require Students to Own Computers Strictly Business at a Community College At the University of Minnesota, Different (Key)strokes At a Religious Black College, the Internet Is Seen as a Tool and a Temptation At Caltech, 'Paradise for Geeks,' Students Build Their Own Gadgets

invited friends over to her room in one of Wellesley College's first-year dormitories to listen.

"I basically re-created the concert in my room," she says.

Ms. Ashington-Pickett uses the Internet to fill in the few gaps and spaces in her busy life. She cheerfully admits that she's a chronic computer user -- even more so than many of her classmates at Wellesley, a liberal-arts college for women that attracts a well-educated and relatively affluent group of students. The vast majority arrive with their own computers.

Ms. Ashington-Pickett is online at least a few hours every day, although she notes that she spends less time using the Internet in college than she did at home in Orlando, Fla. Among her high-school friends, she is renowned for having once held a record 18 AOL Instant Messenger conversations at the same time. "The computer only sleeps when I sleep," she says.

But she doesn't consider herself a computer abuser. "I know I can break off at any point," she says. "I'm not seriously addicted -- it is more of a comfort thing."

Whether one deems her computer use a harmless hobby or a problematic absorption, Ms. Ashington-Pickett is without a doubt a pro. The slight, confident 18-year-old is not a classic computer geek (she disdains most computer games, for one thing) but she knows her stuff, and her computer and the Internet fit seamlessly into her life.

She chose her computer, an Apple PowerBook laptop bought especially for college, with a full understanding of the alternatives. "We are just a big Mac family," she says of herself and her parents and brother back home. "They are so much easier to use, and I just think the Mac is a better product, although I know that I may be a minority in that."

She's not a minority in terms of buying a laptop, however. This year -- for the first time -- more students brought laptops than desktops to campus, says Micheline Jedry, the director of information services at Wellesley. Eighty-five percent of the students at Wellesley bring their own computers. But administrators worry about shortchanging the have-nots, so they have installed several computer labs on campus, and each dorm has at least one computer.

In high school, Ms. Ashington-Pickett spent a fair amount of time researching "add-ons" to make her time on the computer more efficient and fun. She has researched programs, for instance, that help make her scrollbar easier to use.

She's untroubled by the power and reach of that software though, defending, for example, her heavy use of Napster. "I'll generally download about five songs a day -- at least, that is on a bad day."

"I'm not out there like, 'Ha, ha, I'm screwing the Man,' but I just think the record companies are doing just fine as they are. They don't need a cut out of every song." She adds that Napster has helped her discover some musicians who are less well-known, such as the band Jackopierce.

As everywhere else, Napster is hot at Wellesley and hogs a major portion of bandwidth. But Ms. Ashington-Pickett and other avid Napster fans there are in no danger of losing access to sites where they can download songs. Ms. Jedry of Wellesley says the college does not monitor Web activity in any way, and would probably not shut off access to specific sites.

Ms. Ashington-Pickett does almost all of her computer work on her laptop in the small, neat dormitory room she shares with another student. On one recent afternoon she had open a Web page of weather forecasts for her hometown. Only a few feet away, her roommate sat typing on a keyboard while talking on a cell phone.

As a potential political-science major, Ms. Ashington-Pickett has been using the Web quite a bit recently to track the presidential election. "I go to sites where you can guess what the outcome will be, state by state." She is rooting for George W. Bush, but agrees with political pundits that the race will be close.

Ms. Ashington-Pickett says she often goes online to find materials for her courses as well, but usually only to sites that her professors recommend or require the students to visit.

Between classes, Ms. Ashington-Pickett may e-mail high-school friends who are now scattered at different colleges across the country. But she admits that she has had less and less time to spend on recreational Internet use as her course work has intensified and she has met more people on campus. In high school, she says, she might have spent some Saturday nights in online chat sessions with a group of friends, but now she is more likely to go out.

She doesn't seem to mind the change, though. "The computer is always here," she says. "If I am feeling sad or mad, then I can go online and feel better."

Easy-to-print version

E-mail this article