and any advice you want to add !!!!!!
I got a PhD in physics, where the job market was brutal. (I don't know if I was in the top 3% in talent but I certainly was not in the top 3% at either office politics or musical chairs.)
I got into software, did Perl, PHP, Java, ColdFusion, whatever paid. I started developing advertising-supported web sites that gathered content through an "A.I." pipeline just before Deep Learning broke in the news. That got me work on text analysis, productizing a deep-learning based search engine and some other work. I also wound up chasing some dead ends and going sideways at times -- at the moment I am doing pretty much ordinary front end but I am focused on getting really good at it.
(Something I learned the hard way is that real A.I. systems are going to have to work closely with humans. If somebody wants you to build an A.I. that does a 'difficult' or 'impossible' task the first thing to do is build a U.I. that lets a person do the task manually, otherwise where are you going to get the training set from? Starting with anything else is outright malpractice.)