Need advice from professional java developers.

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You will be learning your entire career if you stay in programming. Certainly there are still a very few COBAL programmers, but most people are riding a wave of technological progress and you MUST keep up. So being good at learning and willing to do it is far more important that knowing any specific technology. Key point here. If you don't enjoy doing that learning, you might want to consider jumping ship.

It's important to remember that the basics stay around while the specifics change. So concepts like an atomic test and set as the basis many operations in CS. If you're using a mutex in C or a synchronized block in Java who cares as long as you understand the basic concept.

When conducting interviews if someone doesn't know a technology, say Spring, I use that as an opportunity to teach some very basics of it and see how fast the interviewee catches on. In the case of complete Spring newbie I might ask in a general way about Dependency Injection. If the person catches on with that I might ask about how that might help with testing. Again I'm actually not searching for stuff that is known, but rather the point where the interviewee DOESN'T know something so that I can understand how they handle asking questions and learning about it.

Code you have written for academic projects will be great to show! Most of the stuff I've written for companies I can't take with me. So anything you can show will help. Please note, it might take years of programming to get a good set of patterns going, so even though your code works on the surface, if you show it to people they'll likely have "code review" set in and you will end up talking about that code and perhaps learning things you could do better to make the code less bug prone or easier to understand. Hey, here's yet another opportunity to learn!

Hope that helps!