Final-year cyber student seeking honest feedback from SOC professionals — what should I focus on?

A final-year cybersecurity engineering student who completed a SOC analyst internship is seeking advice from SOC professionals. During the internship, they worked with Security Onion and ELK stack, built detection rules, created Kibana dashboards to track true positive rates, and wrote incident reports with tickets. They are requesting guidance on what to learn next, specific project ideas with implementation details for their GitHub, and whether certifications or hands-on skills are more valuable for securing their next internship.