I have to agree with btrueblood, the aerospace industry is currently facing the biggest crisis it has ever faced, so hiring of new grads has stopped for the most part, and many open positions are being filled by recently laid-off engineers with great resumes, as you've noticed. I'm sorry to tell you this, but you've likely graduated with an aerospace degree in the worst possible year for the past 100 years, and probably the next 100 years as well.
That said, hope is not lost. My advice:
- If you have contacts at NASA, pursue them and see if there are any openings. For any new grad, you best bet for a fulltime position is at the place you interned, assuming you didn't leave a bad impression.
- If you're interested in anything but the lowest rungs of engineering jobs (which are all laying off right now), go for a Master's. When I graduated five years ago, I failed to get a reasonable offer after searching for several months, so I started working towards a Master's degree. Within two months I was offered a great fulltime job in my dream position, and I continued working on my Master's parttime while working. If, for whatever reason, you're deadset against a Master's, you don't necessarily have to finish it, because just saying that you're working on a Master's distinguishes you from other candidates significantly. But, I can tell you that the things I learned in grad school were much more applicable to my career than my undergrad classes, and that having a Master's does good things for your career. Personally, I have yet to work under a lead engineer that doesn't have a Master's degree.
- Try to figure out what subfield of engineering you want to work in, and focus your efforts on getting relevant experience there. For some people, R&D is their calling, and more power to them. However, in my experience, most companies only invest in R&D when times are good. When times are bad, R&D folks get laid off, or they get transferred to some other engineering group, where they underperform for their experience level (of course, when compared to an engineer that has spent their career in that subfield), and have their careers stifled as a result. If you show an employer that you're really all-in on one subfield, that greatly increases your odds of getting an offer in that field. Taking classes in that field and moving to a city where that sort of engineering is popular both help.
- If you're eligible for a security clearance (American citizen, not too many foreign contacts, haven't tried to assassinate the president, etc.) and have a desire to work in Defense, then I would suggest you focus your efforts in that field. I believe this is the only sector of aerospace that isn't suffering right now.
Last but not least,
- Get comfortable with using Excel professionally, programming in Excel VBA, Python, or some other popular programming language, and working with UNIX-based systems, if you haven't already. Honestly, the only major advancement in aerospace in the past 50 years has been the application of computers to engineering and manufacturing. I can't think of a single engineering job where Excel/programming skills wouldn't help you significantly, and any serious computational work is going to be done on a UNIX-based system.
I wish you well in these difficult times, Steven.