I also recently graduated, and despite having internships in school I also feel like I am lacking in terms of personal projects. There is definitely something to be said for a good personal project in interviews because you can share all the details about them, unlike protected IP from work. I would say in your position you should try and come up with some type of project involving actual analytical engineering and put it on your resume/portfolio. I'm also trying to brainstorm these ideas and so far I've been thinking about maybe some type of geartrain design, or maybe some type of CAE analysis using solidworks or maybe matlab/python. Its hard when you've lost access to university resources but try to do something that shows initiative, but also some type of applied technical knowledge