One of my professors said the most terrifying thing to me. It was a Mechanics of Materials class (some call it Strengths of Materials).
He said, "You don't really need to learn this, because you will all just use SolidWorks anyway."
I'm afraid that careers like Toms are no more. Everything is so heavily computer based now that lots of engineers just punch in drawings and numbers and take the computers word as gospel.
The story goes that the 1992 3 series was BMW's first vehicle that was designed using CAD. This car was manufactured with sheet metal too thin around the rear subframe bushings. After about 150,000 miles these tend to tear out of the unibody. All because the engineers took the CAD's output as gospel.
Make sure you talk to your teachers about the difference between Mechanical Engineers and Mechanical Engineer Technicians. Your engineering related stuff at your highschool might be a feeder for METs, which is a much different thing from ME.
I don't really want to get into that at the risk of offending MET's on this forum. Here's a thread I found about it
ME or MET?