finished setting up the Pis (finally), despite the train of issues that tried to stop us:

• the first problem was that the college wifi required sign in, so setting it up headless wasnt working.
• i tried to use lynx, but the website required js on its sign-in page(??) so i couldnt do that.
• i tried to use my tether (basically a hotspot but without hotspot data) but wpa_supplicant wasn’t authenticating properly.
• i tried to use my real hotspot, but the wifi didn’t work with that either. on a whim i switched to 2.4GHz and WPA2 and it worked magically?
• of course rpi connect still didn’t work and ssh wasn’t allowed over my hotspot for some reason so i just had them buy us a monitor, reformatted with a desktop installed, and plugged in a usb mouse and keyboard to authenticate manually.
• of course ssh is blocked on the school wifi (what im using now), but rpi connect works enough.
  that was pretty much the entire day though, the only other thing i did was getting a git repository set up on the pi