Hey Louis,
Are you looking mostly for in-house or consultancy in SF? Either way I would highlight your engineering side a lot more in your portfolio. Unless you’re going to go back to school for ID, the environment is so competitive down there, that I think you’re better off presenting yourself as an engineer who can also contribute creatively rather than a designer that can also engineer.
For CE, I think you’re going to need a plastics project in there. I think approaching manufacturing is likely what’s going to cause an in-house company to want to look for a design engineer, and it’ll be plastics 80-90% of the time. I know you specified maple/tyvek for the light panel, maybe just CAD up a plastics version? I would also include stuff like why you chose the plastic over others, and choose it down to the grade. Include these important stuff in the images so they are the first things to be noticed. I would reduce the amount of text quite a lot.
As far as your TN visa… I never got it figured out, but had my best success by putting “no sponsorship required” somewhere in the cover letter. That at least got me to an interview, though I can’t say if it was coincidence or not. Have you looked much here in Vancouver? Not a ton of hardware happening, but the tech scene is moving more than I saw out east at least.
Can you not include your process on the apparatus for reliably blowing soap bubbles? I think it’s a cool problem to solve, and a lot of hiring designers/engineers would be interested in it as much as some awesome renderings.
I wouldn’t worry about including student projects in there, but I did notice that since Prototype D is typically low volume, those projects come off as personal ones, and you don’t have a lot showing that you know how to do mass production. Could you do something along the lines of “here’s the low volume version, and I also designed a high volume version, people can choose to make or purchase” or “we provide these mass produced parts in a kit for the maker because it makes it cheaper/easier/faster”. I know you mentioned a final version of the watch in the portfolio, perhaps some injection molded mounting is needed when a circuit board is used?