Well, then -- ancient history won't help you much.
By the time you get your mechanical engineering degree, everything will have changed, again, like always.
Learn the math! "complex calculus - ha ha - it's easy, only 2-vectors" "Hamiltonian - conservation of energy - do the math!" "quaternions? bispinors?" Do it!
Corporate whatsises will change, but the ways metal moves - once you learn that you've got something.
Best luck with your endeavors
Speaking as somebody who studied electrical engineering and did quite a few rail related courses while there, and also having worked in the rail industry for a brief stretch and for a supplier to the rail industry for a longer stretch, I agree with all of this.
Corporations come and go all the time and technologies and patents and know how are being sold on all the time. Loyalty is good but you need to cover your bases and know when to jump ship. Knowledge is not really vested with corporations but with the people who work there. As a rule of thumb you can say, the better the people, the better the company. If a key person retires or switches to another company, this can have unexpected consequences for product and engineering decisions. One company I worked at a senior engineer quit over a disagreement with management. It was a relatively minor disgreement but managment wanted to make an example of him and they shemed him and hounded him out. A lot of the junior engineers were loyal to him and loved his style of leadership and after he left morale went down and a lot of people quit quite soon and a lot of knowledge was lost and the whole R&D performance suffered and the company failed on some big projects. Not good. The senior engineer however, once his gardening leave was ended, got a job with the competitor and started hiring in a good number of his former team and they really started making some good stuff and the old company even tried hiring him back but he said no ... revenge is sweet. But it shows how easily a good company can become a bad company and vice versa.
A market leader of today will not necessarily be the leader in 5 years time. In many cases this may be because they bet their future on the wrong technology or lose key developers or misestimate market trends. Sometimes managment make stupid decisons and get involved in technology decisions. This can lead to some pretty crazy things happening. I've seen it all.