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:

College

Additional Requirements / Recommendations

Belk College of Business 

All students are required to have a laptop with the Windows operating system.

Cato College of Education

No additional requirements.

College of Arts + Architecture: School of Architecture

The 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 + Architecture If 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 Informatics

No additional requirements

College of Health and Human Services

No additional requirements

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

No additional requirements.

The William States Lee College of Engineering

Recommended: Dedicated Graphics Video Card (2GB).

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.