All good advice so far.

I'll add one more tidbit. In a seemingly never-ending series of interviews long ago at a company far away (before the current Darkness of HR by formula) set in, several fellows had a standard interview question. They would whip out a schematic and ask the interviewee what it did. (This was an interview for an engineering job with an engineering company.)

They found that this quickly separated the academics from the working engineers. The academics would stutter, stammer and hardly glance at the paper before saying they gave up. The others studied it and started working from what they knew to develop their view of what it did by working on the problem.

All the interviewers were looking for was that the person didn't give up! I didn't give up that day and I got the job.

It was 18 years to my next interview. And it took nearly 2 years to get another engineering job.

Never give up! Never surrender!