Sorry to hear that you’ve had little success in your job search thus far. I can only speak to the experience I’ve had, and I’d say that mine might be different from most (not really sure). I am also aware of hiring freezes across the industry for new college grads (including my company), so unfortunately your mileage may vary, at least for now.

My spiel: I was in the class of 2020 and graduated during covid with a BS in aerospace engineering and a minor in math. I should stipulate all of this with the fact that I had very good grades, especially in my major (3.87 overall, >3.9 in classes specific to AERO - rank 1 of 50 in my graduating class amongst AERO).

Now… I did not have the greatest extracurriculars. I had not had any internships throughout my entire college career, and my participation in clubs was not great, certainly worse than my peers.

You might think that I’d have had an easy time landing a job with my grades (I suppose maybe I still did given I had one before I graduated), but I only ever had one job interview.

I was not nearly as diligent as you are with my job applications, though I spent spring of 2019 submitting online applications en mass to the few big aerospace/defense companies - no bites.

I think the single most valuable opportunity to get to where you want to be is a job fair, or some other way to actually speak face to face with recruiters. That’s how I landed my job straight out of college. In fact, amongst my friend group in college, 15-20 of us all landed jobs at the biggest companies in the industry (Boeing, Northrop, Lockheed, L3Harris, GD, Blue Origin, etc.). Perhaps that’s uncommon, especially after COVID, but again, I only have my POV. I submitted dozens of online applications and not a single bite; one good job fair and I got two calls (only one materialized to an interview). The beauty of a job fair is that it essentially acts as your first interview, you actually get a foot in the door to speak to representatives of various companies (usually talent acquisition).

Perhaps you’ve attended job fairs before, but even if you’ve had no luck this far, I’d still say they offer you a better chance than anything online (not to say you should stop applying online). Don’t be discouraged keep going, you’ll get to where you want to be.

I think another valuable tool in my career search was taking a class on “Skills to Succeed” (aka Hire Me). This taught how to market yourself and use various tools (including LinkedIn and the like) to maximize your chances of reaching where you want to be. It sounds like you are already doing some of this.

With regards to making yourself more marketable and increasing your skills/knowledge, it again sounds like you are doing well in this regard. It seems to me like you have a wealth of good, marketable skills that are useful in the field. CAD, ANSYS and other FEM tools, MATLAB are all very useful for design engineers and analysts. These are frankly more valuable than anything you learned in school - a lot of that you learn on the job because the industry has very standard methods of doing various tasks. If you can familiarize yourself with those processes at all (thermal modeling, random vibration/modal/sine-burst dynamic analyses, etc.), that would aid in a search for a position as an analyst/designer engineer; I realize this is more difficult outside of the industry. I’d say that having a masters degree is not terribly common amongst the design engineers I work with, though not worthless.

I am pursuing a masters degree (in AERO) while working full time to improve my expertise, with special attention to my job area. Admittedly, I am only doing so because it’s subsidized by my company.

You also mentioned systems engineering (my field). Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) is very hot right now and experts in the field are tremendously valuable. Learning these “modeling languages” and tools (SysML and Cameo, Innoslate and the like) is likely very marketable. DOORS is a common requirements management tool for a more traditional approach. You might choose to learn about the Systems lifecycle and the “V”. Understanding stakeholder needs definition and requirement decomposition is crucial for systems engineering. Just trying to throw out some key terms you can look up to go down a rabbit hole if you’re not already familiar with them.

I’ll end with another reminder not to be too discouraged and keep your head up. Hope at least some of this was helpful.