I used LaTeX a lot during my engineering degree but most of the templates I found online were packed with useless, cargo-culted cruft which people had apparently been cutting and pasting for years without any notion of what it was supposed to do.
Over time I gradually developed this pair of simple templates for myself — an article template which I used for assignments and lab reports and a report template which I used for my dissertation.
Here's a longer example of the report template in use.