As much as MATLAB is a great tool, I feel the need to point out that it is roughly equivalent to shooting yourself in the foot long-term.
Unless you plan on working at a huge company with legacy systems you are likely never going to use it outside of academia. My university seems to be transitioning away from it and others I have talked to had similar thoughts. In the cohort of students I went thought grad school with, AFAIK none of us are at companies that use MATLAB.
I don't want to be a downer, but going straight to Python is likely a better long term move.
I interviewed for a position that I was comfortably qualified for. As soon as they mentioned a 3 hour whiteboard interview in person I politely hung up the zoom call.
On the flip side, I had a company give the best interview process of all time. They told you how many people were remaining in the rounds. The programming task was to implement a hugging face model as a FastAPI. There was also a short video interview that took 5 minutes if you had basic ML knowledge. Likely took 1-2 hours tops and it was actually fun.