As part of curriculum, engineers need to complete a significant project at a college level which either demonstrates understanding of the topic or solves some existing engineering problem. While there's no dearth of topics for engineering students to explore, however, in my opinion, budget becomes a problem since it may involve buying material to create a project and demonstrate problem solving ability. An alternative to this is using Catia or CAD to demonstrate problem solution or demonstrate problem solving ability. I have listed below four such projects and you can use ideas similar to the ones I have mentioned below.
Using animate constraints to solve simple mechanism problem
The sketcher workbench in Catia, offers a tool known as = Animate constraints. This tool can be used to solve simple problems that may be related to four bar chain mechanism or some other simple mechanism. For example, you can make combination of sketch profiles in 2D, resembling an engine and can animate it.
Using this, you can find out several parameters of interest like if for a certain connecting rod length, crank length etc. will clearance be enough or not. This is ofcourse the simplest example, and you can read more about it here. Another application of the tool can be found here.