Laptop suggestions for college

Hi, so I'm looking to buy a laptop sometime in the next two months so that I can use it this summer and bring it with me to college (I'll be a freshman at Boston College!), and I've never bought a laptop before and I want something powerful, but reliable. My spending range is $1000-$2000, but I'm okay with spending less too. I don't care about the size of the laptop, but since I'll be carrying it around something obscenely heavy would be annoying. I don't know too much about screen resolution, so I'll leave that to your better judgement. I'd prefer a laptop with a good battery life, the longer the better, but I also want to play games on my laptop, and if it can play Starcraft 2 or Skyrim on High settings that's more than enough for me. I'll need at least 500 gb, and I'm hoping this laptop could survive all four years of college, but I know that's not realistic.

Quick Recap:
- $1000-$2000 or less
- Good battery life
- Nothing too heavy
- Good battery life, maybe 3-4 hours min?
-I want to play games on higher settings
-At least 500 gb of space


I live in the US and any suggestions and recommendation you guys have would be much appreciated. I'm new at buying laptops so if anything was unclear, please ask, and thank you for having the patience to read this and answer.

Thank you!!
Peter