I lived off cheap pizza, see if you can find a place that sells $5 large pizzas in the area. While at school I literally ate a pizza every day for the first year, until I found some other good delivery places for cheap food- ordering take away from outback was actually pretty cheap for a pretty big "jr" cheeseburger and fries off the kids menu, was ~$4-5 to fill me up for virtually the whole day. I remember this one fried chicken place called Cluck-U that was basically driven by the local colleges ordering for delivery. In between pizzas I would make a deli chicken&ham sandwich or chow on oreos/milk, or what I called ghetto potato skins- bacon and mayo on pringles lol. On that note, sending one-a-day vitamins would also be a good idea. receiving snacks and cash was always welcome, obviously. for me, bringing cookware is probably more work than a handful of times when I made taco salad. The girls I knew at school cooked, most of the guys I knew just used the microwave or the indoor grill. if youre not going to send booze, maybe send some gatorade, as that is a pretty good hangover cure so homework can be done on sunday.

I really didnt like talking about my classes with my parents, I just felt like leaving school at school, it wasnt worth the effort to explain how things were going, grades were fine so everything is fine. The exception was basically my art class, as that was something I could actually talk to my parents about, with them having degrees in art. I could talk to them about drawing a tiki-tribesman type thing based on some patterns, but not so much for talking to them about discovering a chloride channel gene in a slime mold for a class project.

Oh, and one more thing, one thing that really helped to bring was a hamper/laundry basket that was made of some synthetic material, maybe nylon or something? anyway, it was pretty useful compared to the plastic ones that other kids had that fell apart on them.
similar to this, but it may have been taller? http://www.global-b2b-net...p_up_laundry_basket.html

and yeah, avoiding morning courses = good idea. fortunately or unfortunately, my college scheduled first and second year classes earlier than the third/fourth year courses, so I had no choice between early/late sections, only early and earlier. the later my courses got over time, the better my grades got. one or two night classes a semester is good, but not mondays in the fall semester, football season!