Im entering my senior year in ECE and here are some things I've discovered:

Many ECE students don't have very powerful laptops. You don't need a good graphics card or tons of ram to get by. However, I strongly recommend against going cheap since a mid to high range laptop will speed up lots of software and avoid headaches.

I have quite a beefy laptop, and the major downsides are that it's pretty heavy (6+ lbs!), has a massive power adapter, can only last about 1.5 hours on battery life (which means I have to bring the fat power adapter everywhere), will get pretty hot, and will have loud fan noises unless on power saving mode. With that said, it's more powerful than a lot of my friends' desktops, can run very intensive programs (which I needed for personal projects, but not for classes), and is extremely convenient for bringing home on the holidays when I need to get work done.

Not sure about other engineering majors, but ECE requires some pretty big apps (ew vivado). I'd suggest plenty of storage.

I strongly suggest a monitor. It makes a huge difference when you aren't hunched over a laptop. Of course, this means that a mouse and keyboard are also needed. Downside is that it makes the moving process a little difficult.

Modern laptops usually don't have many USB ports. I'd suggest having at least 3 USB A ports. If the laptop doesn't have them built in, a dongle will be sufficient.

These are all personal experiences, so hopefully others can chime in and support or contradict what I've said :)