College Guidance

student on laptop

ALL NEW UNDERGRADUATE AND GRADUATE STUDENTS entering UNC Charlotte are required to have a personal laptop computer to support their college experience. In addition, some colleges have additional requirements or recommendations:

CollegeAdditional Requirements / Recommendations
Belk College of Business All students are required to have a laptop with the Windows operating system.
Cato College of EducationNo additional requirements.
College of Arts + Architecture: School of ArchitectureThe NinerReady computer may not meet your needs. Faculty recommend a Windows computer with dedicated processor comparable to AMD Ryzen 7 5800H (20 MB total cache, 8 cores, 16 threads) and a graphics card comparable to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti, 4 GB GDDR6, a computer with 32 GB RAM, an external mouse, Adobe Creative Cloud software, and Rhino 3D Modeling software.
College of Arts + ArchitectureIf you are a Digital Media, Graphic Design or Illustration student, the NinerReady computer may not meet your needs. Faculty recommend a Mac computer with at least 32 GB RAM and 1TB SSD. As well as an external hard drive with at least 2-4 TB of space if you are doing video work.
College of Computing and InformaticsNo additional requirements
College of Health and Human ServicesNo additional requirements
College of Liberal Arts & SciencesNo additional requirements.
The William States Lee College of EngineeringThe hardware recommendations are required for Engineering students.
See the NinerTech Store for more details.

Apple’s new Mac Books (with an M1 chip) require a Virtual machine (ARM only). The latest version of Parallels Desktop may meet this need and can be purchased from https://software.charlotte.edu.