Rio, if you want to be a mechanical or design engineer, you'll need CADD/drafting and if you've had any computer courses in this, you can get a job no problem with a mechanical or other engineering firm! If you haven't had that course in high school, I would take the summer off to take one of those courses and wherever you take it will have places looking for draftspeople and lots of places (at least in the Eastern US :-) love to have student interns because they get to "teach" them and the pay isn't quite as much as what they'd have to pay a "professional" draftsperson (yet -- but as you got on-the-job training you'd become more and more valuable to them and could soon ask for higher salary). It's a very real/marketable skill so you wouldn't have to rely so heavily on personal skills.

Check out this site: http://www.glenco.org/cad.php

Get a job with an engineering firm, even if only as a "runner" (they have to go to government agencies to get permits, to clients to drop off papers, to architectural firms who are working with them to pick up papers for the engineers and/or drop them off, etc.) Then, while you are in school, the firm you work for will still hire you every summer because they "trained" you and, when you graduate they'll snap you up right away because they always need "good" engineers and you will have experience with them and the way they do things, their type of clients, etc. They'll know you and how well you work and know how truly valuable you are so will probably pay you a bit more to make sure competitors don't get you :-)