[SuperBK]

Hey squirrel, I learned Fortran on puchcards too and that was as late as 1979!

Jared, as for as what language to study, as a mechanincal engineer, you may work in mechatonics aka robotics. If you ever do any low level programming of microcontrollers (like the FIRST robot), it will probably be in C, so learning C++ will help you there. (C++ is a superset of C). VB.NET would probably serve you well in general programming tasks like databases, graphs, command consoles etc. You won't go wrong taking VB.NET, but unless you specifially have a need for C or C++ you probably won't use it.
Brian