| Get a desktop dude! It's more powerful, and it's cheaper. For the same price (or less) that you'd pay for a 'work' laptop, you could get a 'gaming' desktop (not that you will have time to play games anyway in engineering, but still...).
From what you said, I would assume that you would mostly stay at home to do school projects and problem sets? Then all the more reason to get a desktop. Even if you stay on campus most of the time (like most engineering students do), it's not like you'd need to carry your computer wherever you go, and you can always use computers in the computer labs. Using school's computers has its advantage, mainly: they would have programs that otherwise would be too expensive to buy (Ansys, CAD, Catia, Matlab, Office what have you).
The only reason that you might need a laptop would be if you're going to be doing your homework a lot when you're working. But then again, when you work, you don't do homework, unless your job consists of mostly waiting or something... Or if you are traveling a lot. But that's not likely to happen as you will spend 15 hours a day in the lab anyway...
"I wanted to ask you guys how much computer skills is recommended for a high school student to pursue engineering in college. I have not taken any computer programming class yet, but am interested in engineering (maybe BME or ChemE)."
I think you'd learn anything you need in college. A solid programming background in C or Java would be good, but most engineering majors would require you to take these classes anyway (in college). Unless you don't even know how to turn on the computer (but that's close to impossible), I don't think you should be worried about it that much. |