I'm in Engineering 1 and I have been a Mac user all my life. That said, it seems to me that a lot of the computer related stuff we do for Engineering is much more Windows friendly than Mac friendly.

So, are there any other Eng students out there (first year or upper year) out there that use a Mac?

I'm in engineering 1 and using a shiny new Macbook Pro. :D And there are actually three others in my res that I know right now using Macs... It's kind of annoying how everything's for Windows, but I get around that by running Parallels.

What's Parallels like to set up? I was thinking of using Boot Camp but if Parallels is easier I might use that.

I would suggest using both: you can use Parallels with your Boot Camp partition. That way you can switch between the two, depending on what you're doing.

From experience, I would say just use the computers in the libraries and computer labs. I tried both Parallels and Boot Camp last year and both made my computer slower when I was using my Mac hard drive. I have just a regular MacBook so it might work better on the MacBook Pro, but just warning.