One solution, if you can find a mining buddy who'll LAN across the dormroom, is to set up your own peershares based thing.  With only you and your mates mining, your difficulty goes to about right for whatever hardware you have on your network; in your case a 2-cpu laptop.  The resulting tokens will be useable only amongst yourselves, but there is no reason why you can't use peershares tokens within a campus 2nd-hand swapshop, a bookshop, or a a whole lot of other businesslike activities which are too small to register a companyname for but well worth doing.  Don't trade courseworks and essays though, as that would devalue your own degree, and certainly be a prohibited misuse of the computer networks.

So, to your "which altcoin may I mine with a cpu" question, my answer is your own custom peershares.