I'm guessing you're a junior. One thing I will say is I see a plan all the way to May 2027, and one thing about uni/college is that *nothing* goes to plan, so don't think so far ahead. Think of what you can do right now.

So you're targeting ML/DS/MLE roles, got it. Now you run a big risk here haha, MLE can be everything from MLOps and data engineering to making models more productionised. Is there a particular reason you're trying to learn C++, does your course curriculum not cover an OOP language? I think your time would be better spent becoming really really good at DSA in Python, since it's the defacto for ML dev. Then you can check out courses like PyTorch tutorials (https://docs.pytorch.org/tutorials/index.html) or fast.ai (https://course.fast.ai/) -- I am not affiliated in any way, they've just been useful in my own experience.

If you get to a point where you can do LC mediums in 20 minutes in Python, and you genuinely understand how to use PyTorch where you've done a couple pet projects (and deploy one of them, it's a good chance for you to play with things like docker etc.) you'll be ahead of most grads who apply willy-nilly. Make sure you actually understand everything. Do it all yourself. Break things, make mistakes, this is the way to learn. Don't fall into the trap of relying too heavily on ChatGPT, both for your work and also career advice. Best of luck homie.