I bugged my ME son to do some programming before college. He didn’t and it hasn’t hurt him a bit. He had some 3D modeling programming experience and has since started code academy for fun since his roommate is a CS major, but having no real experience hasn’t hampered him yet. He’ll learn MATLAB and Solidworks soon, but only when he needs to. Work on your bike and cross that bridge if and when you need to. Good luck. Keep it fun. 
Thanks! I’ve done some 3D modeling through auto desk inventor and actually enjoy that a lot but the whole idea of writing in code isn’t for me. I appreciate the response
I find writing large amounts of code boring also. However, there are times where you need to do a calculation many times, each with slightly different inputs. It can be quite useful to be able to code that and let a computer do the grunt work for you. It becomes a matter of what you find more boring. You would also have that code when you, or someone else, needs to do the same calculation in the future. You will find that many companies have compilations of just such code for doing their work. It does pay to be somewhat conversant in coding.
Puck, do you do that within MATLAB or with a more basic language code? (Asked by a guy who programmed FORTRAN on punch cards and has no clue about modern purposed tool type programming like MATLAB and Solidworks).
Hope the kids are well! My son is experiencing the joys of 12th rotation and random elimination from wait lists. 8-}
Some of the older codes are written in Fortran. Those codes tend to be large codes that one is not likely to change these days. The newer, large codes that I am familiar with are written in C.
MATLAB is used by the structural dynamics engineers and the controls engineers where I have worked. There may be other areas where it is used. MATLAB is a useful language to know for an engineer.
For “casual” programming, it is Visual Basic for Applications within Excel or just straight Visual Basic that I have used. I also do quite a bit in Mathcad, which is not a programming language but can have many attributes of a programming language when dealing with data matrices.
I also believe that all engineers should know programming so that you can deal with programmers. You may have a need to have an involved program written that would be written by a dedicated programmer (I have at least). In that case you need to find a common ground on which to communicate. Knowing some programming helps a lot in that case.
I, too, started out programming in Fortran with punch cards. I once wrote a program that was 3 boxes long in college.
I never got beyond a rubber banded stack. I also did a semester of basic. I’ve considered learning Python (named after Monty for those that didn’t know) just for fun, ya know, old dog, new trick.
For anyone reading this in the future, I visited both universities and both said no programming is required for ME majors.