Like you, I come from a family of academics. An uncle I rarely saw (he lived on the other side of the continent) was also an engineer, but I knew very little about the field. I blazed my own trail.
You are starting in the right place. Studying brakes for a race cars and high speed trains? That's cool stuff. In your case studying brakes may not seem like a big deal, but one day, when someone proposes a brake or clutch that is ill suited for the task, you'll have the background to say "I spent a whole summer studying that, and I have the experience to KNOW this isn't going to work."
Likewise, you may find yourself studying a specific property of various grades of steel. Again, it's not exactly cool stuff, but it can lead to some very interesting design contributions later.
There is a lot of grunt work that you have to put into gather experience before you can get to the real stuff. For example, I spent a summer at Naval Research Lab Electronic Warfare lab writing a report on power combiners. It sounds boring, but it is key for building a robust solid state microwave power amplifier. I know the potential failure modes and design trade-offs, so that I can design better parallel amplifier systems.
These days, I work on water and sewer process engineering. It sounds like a very dull and disgusting job until you learn about what's involved. Where I work it's pretty routine --until something stops working.
I found myself studying ultrasonic flow meters using flumes, weirs, open channels, and the like. It seems boring, but one day I found myself working on a design problem involving the effluent flow meter for a plant. The operational license for this plant depended on that meter --and it wasn't working reliably. There are extensive legal responsibilities, reputations, and significant money at stake. I found and fixed the problem.
I found myself studying failure modes of fiber optic transceivers that weren't reliable. With a bit of experience, you'll find yourself in the middle of acceptance testing and start-ups.
But to get there you need the experience that you simply can't get in school. We spend a year training experienced engineers we hire on everything they need to know to work within our organization. Were you to work where I work, you'd probably spend at least three years getting up to speed on what we do, how we do it, who we deal with, likely failure modes, and so on.
I don't know how else to say this: the education you get in school is nothing but a ticket of admission that indicates you've smelled a bit of theory once upon a time. The practice of engineering is fraught with politics, personalities, habits, responsibilities, old designs, and so on.
Believe it or not, you're on the right path. And one day, if all goes well, you'll wake up and realize that YOU are the engineer in charge --and it won't feel like you're ready, but you won't be able to point at anyone else to do the work.
Eventually, you could find yourself in my shoes: I'm a middle aged engineer who has been doing this for 26 years. I can't exactly say when it happened, but one day I realized that I was looked upon as one of the senior engineers in the group. I'm still somewhat in denial about this, because I sure don't feel like I know everything I ought to. However, I do know who to lean on for more information or experience. I do know how most of the practices got to where they are today. So that's how it happened. It didn't exactly occur overnight, but it doesn't feel like a long slog, either.
As for being ____ (Religious, Female, Disabled, Minority, LGBT, Immigrant, recovering addict --fill in the blank) all I can say is that as long as you don't wear it on your sleeve as an excuse for incompetence, nobody where I work will care very much. We all screw up here and there and the sooner we own up to our mistakes and learn from them, the more our managers and co-workers will feel safe trusting us. What we will not tolerate are the arrogant people who won't admit they've done anything that may have gone poorly, or the responsibility shirkers who won't put their name on the line for anything.
I have read that this isn't always the case, and for those stuck in positions like that, you should know that there are employers out there who do their level best to accommodate a diverse workforce.
