<p>I’m also a CEE and at Rice, all engineers (except bio-e’s) are required to take introductory MATLAB. civ-e’s, elec’s, and mech-e’s are also required to take matrix analysis with MATLAB. Point being, we need to know MATLAB, so it’s definitely a good idea to be familiar with that. I’ll second alchemist007 in that MATLAB’s language is not so different from Java (in which I took an introductory class in high school) so if you learn MATLAB first the transition to Java scripting won’t be too hard.</p>