which distro would you recommend for an electrical engineering student?

Any standard distro might do. It depends on what kind of computer experience you're looking for. Do you like systems that do everything for you (and maybe get it wrong) or systems that require you to do your own configuration to some extent? Do you want bleeding-edge software (with the possibility of breakages) or only software that is tried and tested? Are you using a big new machine or an old one? How much experience (if any) have you had with non-Windows systems?

These are the sort of questions to consider when choosing a distro. In your position, I would also browse around the Distrowatch site for ideas.

In addition to the recommendations by Hazel, I'd suggest looking at an "easy" distro like Linux Mint. The distros all have more or less the same applicatioons available, but the "easy" ones have more set up so you can focus on your activities more than system administration. Later, if you run into boundaries with whatever you choose, then you can look towards customizing your set up more or even switching distros. However, pretty much any distro can be made to look and act like any other distro by adding, removing, and configuring packages.

If you are planning to design hardware, you might be interested in this overview of appliations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwMdpRSCc_E

It was presented recently at the Open Source Summit and Embedded Linux Conference 2017 which was in Prague last week.

I'm not specifically familiar with the needs for electrical engineering, but generally I'd expect that you want something that takes up little of your time administering the system itself, and you'll want the largest software selection. This would make me lean toward Debian, because Debian's software repositories are the largest.

Also, Debian is notably the most popular Rasberry Pi OS (Raspbian), and is all around the most popular linux OS for that sort of small system. It's relatively lightweight, compared to other major Linux distributions, and it also has the largest software repositories, and it supports a broad range of CPU architectures.

Debian tries to be the "universal operating system", which is why they support so many more CPU architectures than other linux distributions.

I'd agree with those who recommend an "easy" distro. As Linux Torvalds once said, if you have a job to do, you want to be able to get on with it and not waste time tinkering with the operating system. Mint is simple and reliable. Debian, to me at least, seems to be a very good server distro somewhat inadequately adapted to the desktop.

This shows you some of the stuff available
https://linuxappfinder.com/scientifi...ing/electrical
There's more, of course.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Engineering...nts_use_linux/

Sometimes developers will tell you that their software works on a specific distro, but that simply means that they tested it on that one: they can't try them all!

Being an "electrical engineering student" does not qualify you for a certain OS, let alone "distro". Choose whatever you can work with.