Unless you are particularly interested in a specialization, I'd recommend using that academic time to just become a better generalist. Yet more data structures and algorithms. Yet more math. Yet more database stuff. Sure, add some ML and neural nets on top, but you don't need to go overboard. Learning core stats is more useful imo.
A lot of the stuff you'd want for general employment isn't taught in school. It's boring stuff that you learn over time with a lot of Googling unless you're already a sysadmin or something. It's kind of absurd how long it takes to get a junior dev set up with an environment for coding on a particular project, they usually don't know how to put things in PATH or use docker and so on. But if you can do math or solve challenging (but yet boring) problems or do full stack web dev, you'll be a reasonably hot commodity.
In my experience, there are good trajectories that are about specializing and carving out a niche to the point that you could start your own enterprise using your contacts and knowledge (make a co-op or something). At the same time, you don't want to be stuck 15 years later not having generalized at all and in an industry where your specialization has been made obsolete. Having a bit of both is a good place to be.
Unless you are particularly interested in a specialization, I'd recommend using that academic time to just become a better generalist. Yet more data structures and algorithms. Yet more math. Yet more database stuff. Sure, add some ML and neural nets on top, but you don't need to go overboard. Learning core stats is more useful imo.
A lot of the stuff you'd want for general employment isn't taught in school. It's boring stuff that you learn over time with a lot of Googling unless you're already a sysadmin or something. It's kind of absurd how long it takes to get a junior dev set up with an environment for coding on a particular project, they usually don't know how to put things in PATH or use docker and so on. But if you can do math or solve challenging (but yet boring) problems or do full stack web dev, you'll be a reasonably hot commodity.
In my experience, there are good trajectories that are about specializing and carving out a niche to the point that you could start your own enterprise using your contacts and knowledge (make a co-op or something). At the same time, you don't want to be stuck 15 years later not having generalized at all and in an industry where your specialization has been made obsolete. Having a bit of both is a good place to be.