re: Laptop recommendations for undergrad engineering

It's really more the 3700U is a pretty lackluster processor. Now if we were talking the 3700X I would agree it would be a good fit here, but that's a desktop chip.

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Unless there's something about engineering work that makes clock matter more than cores,

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You mean like AutoCad?

AutoCad doesn't support multiple cores unless you are doing 2D Regeneration.

For AutoCad, clock speed is king.

I'll stay out of the specs game, but I'll tell you that Costco usually has some pretty smoking deals online. Many of the outgoing models can go for $500 off.

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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.