Do you have anything to do with math, ever? Have you been assigned projects which require you to make use of some kind of mathematical software, like MAPLE, or MATLAB, or Mathematica? Chances are, if you take anything heavy in statistics or applied math, you have been or will be. Now, you have options. You could pay for a license ($99 for MAPLE, $139 for Mathematica and these are student prices), you could pirate them (risky, banned at UMW and illegal), you could trudge on over to Trinkle in the dark and the snow (winter is coming, after all), or you could go for the free, open-source alternative: Sage.
Sage works on Windows, Mac (binaries are coming for Lion, but the Snow Leopard release should work) and Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora or source). It’s a hefty download (1.4 gigs for Windows), but after that you’re using your computer for what computers were built for: all that math stuff. Do you have any account online, ever? Google, Yahoo!, WordPress? (Myspace?) Try it free, online (i.e., no download), here. DO IT NOW.