Hi Natasha @natyd27 ,
It’s not mandatory, there are ways around it. For instance, you can enable Emulate Numpad (wouldn’t recommend that though) in your Preferences:

but it is great if you have one, makes some things (shortcuts) easier.
The first two years, I used Blender without a Numpad, so it’s very do-able.
As the Numpad is mostly used for Views, you can use the Key below the Escape to activate a View Pie Menu:

This is, what I would recommend, instead of Emulate Numpad, but you can play around and see what works best for you.