<p>Hope I’m not breaking any rules about resurrecting old threads: I went back to this forum to ask a question, and realized everything I was going to write was exactly what I had written 1 year ago. </p>
<p>So, it’s a year late, but thanks for your reply j89. </p>
<p>Update since last year: I took some online classes at Wichita State University to learn CFD through the AIAA (Intro and Adv lessons: basically PDE basics, Navier-Stokes modeling, grid generation, Euler Equations, etc.) and right now I’ve been building a couple projects including designing a solar panel experiment to observe how voltage readings change based on the sun’s orientation (may go out tomorrow to get data for Winter Solstice and then compare that data with some I took during the Summer), worked on a couple complex CAD assemblies in Solidworks before it finally expired, started teaching myself Web development and Android App development, and right now am looking into building a wind tunnel and am currently developing a CFD code to visualize the flow field within (constructed a BOM: it would cost about $600-650 assuming none of the hardware broke. Might just CAD it up in a different program if costs become an issue since I’m rather broke right now. A friend of mine recommended Autodesk Fusion 360.). I’ve also been reading up on sabermetrics and getting better at baseball analysis and statistics.</p>
<p>I’ve been keeping myself busy in the interim. However, I’ve still had little success getting interviews, and the interviews that I have gotten rejected from are mostly due to lacking experience or not being qualified enough for positions.</p>
<p>How does one become a qualified engineer without job experience? I really want to design and build stuff to hopefully become more marketable (as well as alleviate boredom and also because I like designing things), but I’m finding that with hardware, money is a major issue, which I can’t get without a job, which I’ve been unsuccessful at getting in the past 18 months (officially: I was constantly rejected from internships in college, so technically the job search has been going on for much much longer). Anyone know what I can be doing differently so that I can hopefully find work? Thanks.</p>