Have you looked around at what's going on at your college? Many good open source projects start out as research projects, some of which will even pay you a lit

Have you looked around at what's going on at your college? Many good open source projects start out as research projects, some of which will even pay you a little to help them out. If this is just for fun and self-improvement, just keep looking around until you find a team that seems to appreciate that. Google SoC may be a good start. If you're thinking of pursuing a software career, I'd recommend considering projects that would help you in whatever kind of work you do later on. For example if databases are your thing, take a look at PostgreSQL or sqlite3. If you're into server-side web infrastructure, consider joining a project like memcached or squid, etc.