Final Polish & the Real Placement-Ready Checkpoint

DSA: The entire Striver A2Z sheet, sharp under contest conditions, not just "completed once."

Core CS: All of OOPs, DBMS, SQL, OS, CN, LLD, HLD — 100% done — plus 5 fresh, never-listed system-design problems (Web Crawler, Splitwise, Distributed Cache, Twitter News Feed, live schema/API design) designed and defended from scratch.

AI/ML: Classical ML → Deep Learning → GenAI/LLM fundamentals built from the ground up, an NLP/LLM specialization with fine-tuning, advanced RAG, agents, and evaluation, MLOps fundamentals, 2 closed-out Kaggle competitions, and 2 shipped capstones.

Java Backend: Production-grade Spring Boot skillset — REST, JPA/Hibernate, Security, Testing, caching/async/scheduling, microservices, Kafka — plus modern Java (8 through 21), concurrency, JVM internals, and a real Spring AI + MCP integration.

Portfolio: 8–10 GitHub repositories that tell one coherent story — from CS50P basics through a production AI-powered Java backend — that no interviewer can mistake for "just did the core CS sheet."

Total mock interviews: 16 comprehensive mock interviews across all technical domains.

Don't let 40+ weeks of DSA atrophy over a 3-month interview season. Keep the weekly-contest habit from Phase 9 going for as long as placements run.

Keep reading papers weekly — Two Minute Papers and Yannic Kilcher for what's worth reading — and watch the Agents/MCP space specifically; it's moving faster than almost anything else in the field right now.

Contribute to an open-source repo. Given your Spring AI work is now real, consider a small contribution to Spring AI or LangChain4j itself, or a well-known RAG/agents tooling project.

Keep writing publicly. You already have two strong stories (the from-scratch GPT/RAG capstone, and the Spring AI production system) — don't let them sit only on GitHub.

As placements actually get underway, refresh your aptitude with a handful of TUF+ mocks, and tailor which capstone you lead with per company: if a role leans research/ML, lead with the Phases 3–6 work; if it leans backend/platform, lead with the Phases 7–9 Spring AI system. You now have both, which was the entire point of this roadmap.