You're in the exact same situation I was a month ago. Got into a uni where it's basically required to have a laptop.
I had a budget of about €550 though, so i went with an Acer Aspire V3-574G. There's a few versions, mine has an i3 processor and an nvidia geforce 940m. It runs everything I need it to, visual studio, matlab etc. And games like Binding of Isaac (i literally JUST finished a run on it), Civ5...

My main requirement was that it was FHD and that it had an IPS screen. I would 100% recommend you to aim for a laptop that has an IPS screen. The colors stay almost the same at any angle your screen is at.

I play tf2 with decent frames (80-120) on an i3 laptop with an integrated GPU.

So you shouldn't be worried about running games like Isaac. You can play them on pretty much anything

asus or msi. make sure it has an ssd it's worth it

I'd recommend scouting out kijiji/craigslist if your budget is low. You can often find graduating students selling laptops at reasonable prices... for instance I got my current laptop for 320$ on kijiji and then added my own RAM and SSD

my ideapad y150p was a good buy. i ended up getting a full tower but as far as laptops go i would rec it, should be within your budget.

Bump was wondering how the touchpads were for those recommended laptops.

Any other recs with good touchpads/battery life at ~$1k? I was thinking Apple + thermal paste but if there are better options I'm all ears.

i play tf2 on a macbook air and im dying

Iirc bootcamp + Windows makes it a lot better but I don't play tf2 anymore or plan on using my laptop for tf2

How is the laptop for just general use (display, load times, etc.)

Asus and Lenovo are the best brands to look at in my experience.

While Asus laptops are more pricey, you get a 2-year warranty (At least here in NA), and they're fairly well built (Mine fell violently onto the cement floor at GXL and was perfectly fine).