USB drives

Hi I'm going to college on september 5th, but living at home and commuting. I was thinking about getting a usb drive to transfer papers and other items home at nite. While they have a online transfer hub that i can log onto and get my saved papers there, i still want something physical that i can hold on. The machines at my collage,look like they are mostly pcs, hopefully using the newest version of Microsoft office. I'm going out this weekend and using my student discount to purchase said office. I was wondering about the usb drives, are they going to be compatible with both operating systems to retrieve my papers? am i going to have to format the drive in a particular way? if so is there a way that both operating systems can use the drive? has anyone used the usb drives in that way, probably somebody has. can anyone recommend a good one in the range of 1 gig to like 2gig? cheap if possible. are the drives all the same? thanks i know this is a lot but thanks to anyone that is answering.