I dont think the idea of doing free work in order to learn and acquire knowledge and skills is that unpopular or controversial. At least I myself did that when

I dont think the idea of doing free work in order to learn and acquire knowledge and skills is that unpopular or controversial. At least I myself did that when I was in university. I got into open source community and started contributing to the Haxe programming language. I ported some libraries from another languages and contributed some unit tests and CI configs (Travis, AppVeyor, SauceLabs) to the Haxe repo. Since I become a frequent contributor, the core developers are much more willing to teach and answer my questions on not just Haxe but coding knowledge in general. After I graduated I was employed by the Haxe Foundation and that was my first fulltime paid job.