For those who want jobs, internship or co-op experience along with a good GPA is paramount. If you achieve an excellent GPA at Alabama, you will be considered for the job along with everyone else from a good school. Ultimately though, school is about learning more than grades or GPA. Challenge yourself, take risks, learn and grow.
Starting salaries at UA are high: https://career.sa.ua.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/ENG-Summary-Report-May-2015-Bachelors.pdf
Ultimately, being an engineer is about:
- Being passionate about tinkering, building things.
- Knowing math and theory (physics, linear algebra, and differential equations) and being able to apply these concepts to model physical phenomena and systems.
- Being able to reason about the fundamental building blocks of your field. In EE, resistors, inductors, capacitors, transistors, electromagnetic fields, semiconductors and microelectronics. A lot of things that appear to be “theoretical” or “useless” are important in developing a deep understanding of the material. How do certain circuits behave when the input voltage have a certain frequency? What if the frequency is in the gigahertz, what effects are present, why?
- Understanding how to compose smaller systems into larger systems and being able to reason about how these systems work with each other.