Software for a Student

As a student Rhino is $128 to buy, and you own it. They even let you upgrade it to a commercial license after graduation (at a cost).

Solidworks is $86 (as a student), but that is for a one year license. They are both really powerful, and industry standards.

Fusion 360 is free to students. It isn’t an industry standard, although it is getting adopted fairly quickly. Fusion will let you model in the same ways that Rhino, and Solidworks do, plus it offers T-splines sculpting.

For rendering. Go with Keyshot. They have a student version available too, and Keyshot 7 (getting released soon) looks like another big jump in its capabilities.

You can’t go wrong with any of the above. With the internet, it is so easy to over analyse every decision you need to make. The most important thing is to just pick one, and learn it.