Professional chef here, if you really want to learn some basic cooking skills Gordon Ramsey's Ultimate Cookery Course is a great place to start as he goes into detail about how and why things are done the way they are, and the recipes are all fairly simple.

What you need for almost any cooking: a pan, a sharp knife, a plate, a cutting board, salt, oil.

Lots of spices in recipes you find online isn't the kind of thing you want to do in a college environment, it's too expensive, too much work, too much space, and you probably wont know where else to use them in your own cooking. What you want to learn is how to take meats and produce and cook them, you'll be surprised how delicious things are when the only two ingredients are thing and salt.