i was looking at my schools software website and i can get lightroom for under $100.
If you need it, It's a great deal but do NOT select which way to go based on price. You can easily sink hundreds of hours into using this kind of software. So the cost divided by the number of hours used is say a buck or less. Would you waste an hour of your time to save a buck and then do it again and again hundreds of times? If you think in those terms you will get what you need, not just whatever is cheap. The student price of Aperture is only $80 more. $80 is nothing compared to the
time you will put into this
That said, Lightroom may just be exactly what you need. I would use it for the full 30 day free trail period. Put at least 1,000 or so images into it and see if you like the workflow. LR seems to be intended for the person who shoots a large volume of RAW format images and wants a well defined "garden path" type post processing work flow. Is that you? The thing is you need to do more than "play" during the 30 days. Use it on your actual images. Aperture looks like more of a "tool box" where there are a zillion ways to do anything with no imposed structure.
There are other options too. Many long time Adobe users prefer Bridge and Camera Raw. It is a great combination and comes with Photoshop.
As a beginner you best bet might be to start out with iPhoto and use it until you find it does not do something you need.
