Gotcha. Things might be a little different at street level. Enemies might not have "professional" level dice pools, or if they are, they're "bosses" or some sort and meant to be a challenge where they would be normal opposition in other games.
What I mean with skills is you have many skills with low dice pools, which translates to very low utility. Rolling 4 dice is statistically 1.33 hits. Why roll 4 dice for swimming when you could take Levitate and not worry about it? Why roll 4 dice for Running when you're not going to generate enough hits using that action versus just using normal unrolled movement? Compare this to improving skills that help the mage role better - more Counterspelling, more Assensing, more Perception. Simply trading in Clubs lets you boost your Pistols even higher (and with that I'd suggest Automatics instead because auto fire rules help your relatively low dice pool a LOT and machine pistols are very easy to conceal, plus it lets you use an AR if you ever need to).
It's also like...ok, you're not a face. Do you have a face in the group? If you do, you may as well not take Negotiation, because it comes up very infrequently and a dedicated face will get miles more out of it than you will with your dice pools. And having a little bit of Con helps everyone. Stuff like that. If you never think you'll do combat driving, you don't need Pilot: Groundcraft because just driving your car in normal traffic should never necessitate a roll.
The book is confusing because it makes all skills look equally valuable, when they are simply not. It also doesn't do a good job of telling you that Googling a restaurant should never require a Computer roll or climbing a secure ladder should never require Gymnastics or, again, driving a car in normal traffic without trying to be a Die Hard movie should never require a Pilot: Ground roll.
Generally, I encourage mages to take shooting over melee. If you are using a gun, you're less likely to be immediately outed as a mage and focus-fired to death because "geek the mage" is an in-setting conceit for good reason. If you have a gun and are also using spells without massive visual components or which aren't visibly coming out of your body, you can have the benefits of powerful area debuffs without "outing" yourself, leaving opposition to focus on tankier characters.
But really, it doesn't matter if you pick melee or shooting here except insofar as it's easier to boost ranged modifiers with gear, and with your relatively low BOD, you're better off shooting from cover than mixing it up in melee.
I suggest Ball Lightning over Blast mainly because the Electricity energy type is great. It does extra damage to drones and penalizes initiative. I'm otherwise not sure what you're trying to get out of your spell list. Ice Sheet looks good on paper but isn't as good as it looks. You now have 3 ways to fight: melee, spells, and ranged, but can use only one per round. Hence why I suggest taking Ball Lightning instead of Lightning Bolt, dropping Blast and Ice Sheet, and picking up utility spells like Levitate and Improved Invisibility. I suggest this because any guy with a gun can do damage like you can (and probably better to single targets) but being a caster opens up utility options that sams and physical adepts (i.e., traditionally fighty characters) simply can't replicate. So while it's good to have some combat capability.
My perspective is...specializing in combat is easy, especially for archetypes who are less toolbox, hence I think it's easy to paint yourself in a corner when mages can easily be batman instead of the hulk.
Gremlins is also a bit of a trap but w/e, there are tons of other NQs out there I'll note.
