My IT department recommends a Dell Inspiron 14 5000 or a Dell Inspiron 2-in-1 7000. However, security and FOSS are very important to me. I want a laptop with some form of open firmware—such as coreboot—but I also strongly prefer AMD to Intel. I am a freshman going into college to study CS.
I'm also a CS student and I settled on buying a refurbished thinkpad from ebay for like around 90~ USD. For me, it gets the job done with most tasks however VMs are kinda of a pain in the ass. If you do buy refurbished definitely get one without an OS 'cause depending on your engineering program, you may get a free key for the educational version of Windows 10 which I absolutely prefer over the shit they usually preinstall on your computer.