Lenovo Thinkpad order questions

[Whitieiii]

I'm looking at buying a Thinkpad brand new and the state might pay for it while I go to college since college is for work but does Lenovo have student discounts to hopefully get a higher end laptop hopefully for under $2K... I'm going to go with a T490 since it's on the approved list of laptops for my class but what specs should I go with? I'm thinking I might go with lower speed i7 1080p display 16GB ram 1TB SSD.. I'm going to be messing around with some video games and some computer networking and I don't want to look like I'm greedy but also don't want to skimp on specs...the model in the college store is an i7 256GB SSD 8GB ram model but knowing me the SSD and graphics card are going to kill it for me ever buying that model... any suggestions for what specs I can go with? The college store model costs $2200 so I don't think that's with discounts