My first own computer was a Pentium II with 300Mhz, 64MB Memory, an Elsa Gladiac Erazor graphics card and a 4GB HDD. I got it around the year 2000, it was a used computer from the company of my parents. Before I got this one I was allowed to play on the 286 and later the 486 which my parents had in their company's office. My first mobile was a Nokia 6210 and I got it around the year 2001.
You should learn the basics of VBA, as much as I despise this language, I can tell you as a mechanical engineer myself, that you will stumble over countless excel sheets with VBA from your colleges and it's good to have at least a rough understanding of what they did. Also it's unfortunately the automation/macro language of many CAD-Systems (Catia, SolidWorks, Inventor,… to name just a few). Python with jupyter notebooks or julia with weave are also worth taking a look into it. They a both pretty good for calculations + documentation and drawing nice graphs. That's what most of my collegues do in excel with VBA, but it's much nicer to do in the two mentioned before.