OP- you are early in your academic journey. So my guess is that you are taking prerequisites- which means you’ve got a LOT of people in your classes just trying to get their ticket punched. You won’t get to the cool and interesting stuff until next year. So slow down!
There isn’t a single engineering professor at Vandy who doesn’t have connections into industry. That’s what professors do- they teach, they do research, they consult for companies trying to solve complicated problems. So for now, just ignore career fairs and the “official” job and internship market, and understand that once you’ve developed relationships with your professors, interesting opportunities could be a phone call away for you.
Ignore the sub-specialties, or what you perceive to be “stuff I’m not interested in”. Engineering is inter-disciplinary. Regardless of what “box” someone sits in, engineering requires a LOT of collaboration with people who learned different things than you did. And so research, collaboration, internships, jobs, projects, etc. aren’t always going to have the right nomenclature for you- but could be VERY cool and interesting regardless. Young guy on my street who is a mechanical engineer working on a quality control team for a medical device company. He says that other than the required bio class (every engineer takes it at his college) he had no knowledge, experience, skill, mastery of the sophisticated medical and anatomical issues needed to work in the biomedical field. But that’s not why he was hired. He was hired because something implanted in someone’s chest needs to have a zero defect rate– and he was the guy who developed the manufacturing protocols for the company. Start up which is already getting tons of attention from the VC community- such a cool and groundbreaking invention– and he’s one of the few people on the engineering team who had actual “line production” experience (internship at a food company).
So slow down. Maybe you should transfer or maybe not. But it is WAY too early to conclude that Vandy can’t meet your intellectual interests while you’re still covering off the pre-requisites.
Can’t help you on the social front. Except to say that it’s also very early there.
Hugs. It gets better.