Using My Mac at college

Hello, I will be a freshman at Worcester Polytechnic Institute this fall. My family have been mac users since the early days (the first computer i remember was the Mac Classic 2). I am going to WPI for either mechanical engineering or robotics engineering, and I know some software I use will be windows exclusive. On my current Imac, I do use bootcamp successfully for a few odd jobs on windows. But as I go off to college I have a few questions about bootcamp before I decide on buying a MBP.

While running Windows 7 through bootcamp, would I need to install virus protection software onto my windows partition, or because I am running it through my mac, will i still have the virus protection I have come to love on our macs? If a virus were to infect my windows 7, would it be isolated to the partitioned space of the hard drive, or would that virus risk affecting my OSX files as well?

And does anyone attend/know someone who attends WPI (or a similar engineering school) and uses a mac on campus. Any first hand insight i could get would be appreciated.

Running Windows means you'll need anti-virus, nothing about running it on a Mac makes the OS immune to viruses (virii)..

Do call the IT department at WPI and ensure that you can access the network at school with your Mac..a lot of universities end up using some sort of a login system that might require a program to run on your computer..and most of them only support Windows, so Linux and Mac users are kinda left in the dark..

To answer your first question- yes you will. But I believe WPI has an antivirus client that they provide free to all students (at least my friends there believe so). That said- if you were to get a virus it should be localized to the Windows 7 partition as the format of the Macintosh partition is not in a format that windows can natively write to. I'm not sure if a virus could corrupt to the boot table as I have no idea how that is set up on a mac, but given the fact that windows is natively using the hardware on your mac to run, other hardware parts could be damaged- some viruses actually corrupt firmware and such on other components (though is not so common anymore). On a further note- viruses should not be a huge problem at WPI, as many of the services are monitored and/or blocked while on campus (bittorrent, p2p, etc.)

To answer your second question- yes I several friends that attend WPI/have just graduated. You can use a mac on campus, one of my friends is a pretty big mac person, she has an ipad, mbp I think, etc. and I never really heard of any complaints from her. Plus you have to realize WPI actually has a decent amount of computer labs/terminals around campus that you can use in the event that you need to access some of it. All in all though, a mbp bootcamped with windows should do the job for you.