re: Laptop recommendations for undergrad engineering

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I have no idea what an engineering undergrad uses their laptop for, but under no circumstances should you get him a laptop with a mechanical hard drive. SATA SSD is good. NVME M.2 is better.

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Almost nothing is going to make as big of a difference as the differnce between a mechanical hard drive and an SSD.

You can get all the ram, all the CPU, and none of it's going to matter because it will inevitably waiting on disk I/O.

SSD has been a modern game changer.

Having said that, for engineering:

At least 16 gig of ram, 24 or 32 better
1 TB SSD isn't that expensive nowadays.
Intel i7

I've had a few brands of laptops but like Lenovo lately.

if you want it to last 4 years consider a business class model, particularly in the Thinkpad line.