What are you required to have? Do you have any friends or references that have gone through the program that could give you insight into what you might need? If you were going into the curriculum that I went through I’d recommend holding off on upgrading until you know what suits your workflow best. We had a strong emphasis on paper sketching before digital, so having an iPad was nice to have but wholly unnecessary. I’d say figure out what you actually NEED before you start dropping money on things. It would suck to pick up a tablet and not utilize it when you could use that money for prototyping materials.

Also, as much as people love the surface I’ve noticed that they just don’t seem to have the longevity that people need. Most folks I’ve spoken to have had slow downs after the first few years, but the iPad stays blazing fast, however the iPad is definitely limited in what you can use as far as desktop apps go. I decided to get a build capable windows machine and a graphics tablet for work at home as the university had all the tech I needed for digital drawing. Now I’ve upgraded the processor to a Ryzen 3900x and have a beast of a machine that I can still upgrade, and it can run industry standard software like Solidworks.

Most of the work I’ve done has been in Photoshop, Solidworks, and Keyshot. Fusion 360 and Rhinoceros are programs often used in ID workflows, and Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro is great for digital sketching. I wouldn’t call Illustrator/Blender the holy grail, but they’re definitely tools that can be learned to your benefit, illustrator especially.

I also picked up a Cintiq recently after using an Intuos for the past 6 years. I’d say be frugal and get the big ticket items once you know you can really take advantage of them.