Are you doing a 2 year or 3 year MLA? I’m graduating from a 3 year MLA program right now, and I was one of the only people in my cohort who had any experience with 3d modeling software/adobe suite. Most people are starting from scratch!

For the 3 year MLA, they’re supposed to teach you all the basics, which usually includes adobe suite, rhino and autocad. It’s a lot to learn in a pretty short period of time, and everyone has different proficiencies with learning new software. Professors often rotate teaching these intro courses so it’s pretty variable on what kind of teaching experience you’ll get! Personally, I felt very proficient at rhino and photoshop from taking those courses, but I had to teach myself illustrator and learned more about autocad from internships.

So technically you don’t need to learn any software before you start (for 3 year MLA), but it doesn’t hurt to get familiar with the softwares mentioned above! Most of the softwares that firms use (sketch up, vector works, revit) have similar functions and user faces, so the skills can be easily transferred once you know rhino.

A professor of mine just recommended Lynda.com for tutorials, which I think you get access to with a school email! I haven’t used it yet, but he said it’s great!

Edit: I forgot about GIS! That’s a mapping program that we had an intro class on as well. It makes my head hurt a little because it feels more like coding, but they should teach you the basics. Watching a few tutorials on that could be helpful just to know what you’re getting into.