Hello guys, I am a student from India in one of the Tier-1 colleges pursuing BTech in CSE. I am in my pre-final year and am practicing LeetCode to get better at problem solving and be able to land into a good company during placements.
Where do I stand as of now?
I had my internship season which started from End August and some companies are still to come. I didnt quite do much competitive coding before, though I had won some reputed national hackathon and have some good projects which I made as a part of some college technical teams. Those projects are majorly development ones, where I mostly contributed as a backend developer and full-stack in some of those. I became a huge gaming addict and didnt quite do Competitive before, though I worked hard on these technical teams' projects. I got interned in a reputed company luckily but I dont want to work there as my first full time role. So, I will try better during placements as most big companies come to my college.
What I want help with?
As of now, I have started participating in LC contests and been doing LC daily challenge from September, missed some days due to mid-terms/health issues.
I am well comfortable in python3 and did most of Competitive in it till now, though I know basics of STL and important DSs in Java.

Should I switch to C++ or Java or keep doing in Python3?
I am mostly able to do 2 problems in weekly contests, and almost the third or fourth one at max. But I dont apply dedicated DP, specific bitmasking, graph algos etc. I just do question with the algorithm I can think of. I want to approach problems in a more concrete way, as in proper DP or do BFS, DFS etc. How should I start doing it?
I read some posts and saw that Cracking the coding interview book is a good one and should be read. But its too long and I just have ~8months, where I need to learn all these concepts, solve as many problems as possible and learn as many techniques as I can. Should I read that book?