If you want to buy a little insurance for your self look into getting a seed box. Then you can download from the seed box with a VPN over sftp. I would think that would be pretty hard to determine what you're doing but I don't know enough about it to speak confidently one way or the other.

At my uni you get kicked out if they catch you doing that, so I wouldnt risk doing it on school wifi. I dont know how it is at your uni but at mine they get suspicious when you use a VPN. I would just pirate at a public wifi (Café ect.).

Use a VPN all the time, not only when you need it.

VPN worked for me and others all through uni, adding in the seed box layer seems even better.

Make sure you bind your qbittorrent network interface to the vpn interface and check for any leaks. Test it by suddenly turning vpn off midway through to see if anything leaks.

Get a seedbox. It's 100% safe

VPN should be enough. Just make sure you bind your torrent client to the VPN interface. If you want to be extra careful, use a seedbox or a debrid service.

If you use MAC randomization for the guest network AND set up your VPN right you should have playable deniability. Just never admit to it and you should be chilling.

If you can use a VPN, do it. They probably won't block them.

Seedbox or vpn with remoting into a home sever would be safest

Guest network would be best as any large downloads can be tracked back to your account.

Randomize Mac address

And for overkill, try to randomize which wifi node you are using to be less predictable.

I wouldn't risk it.

i don't even know what the it dept thought when i was in university and napster/kazaa were just becoming a thing and people went from 56k at home to t1.

Honestly if you are doing only torrents, then using a debrid service works great. I have tried VPN, Usenet, and debrid. You copy the magnet link or upload the .torrent file and if it's a popular file, it will already be downloaded and you can download from them immediately. Otherwise you wait a little bit for them to download it. Doing this does not require VPN and typically it is hosted at a fast server and will download as fast as your internet can go. It's 3€ a month which is less than a good VPN anyway.