I see that you mention being at college. If you have a student number and your place of learning is registered with Microsoft you could qualify for the Dream Spark program.
https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/
This is a sort of act of atonement by Microsoft where they allow students full copies of their professional grade applications in the hope of hooking users early on. I imagine that at least one of the reasons for this is that the cost of MS products has become a deterrent and a spur to the adoption of open source applications.
Nevertheless I have Visual Studio Professional 2008 beta and SQL Server 2005, VS 2005 Professional and Server 2003 are also available amongst others. These download as an ISO file and the file sizes are huge, but they are free. It is one way of experiencing the professional tools that you will use without the file size restrictions that apply to the trial versions.