This comes up in the mentors list like clockwork. A tiny patch here or there won't hurt your chances of getting your proposal looked at. In fact, some projects

This comes up in the mentors list like clockwork. A tiny patch here or there won't hurt your chances of getting your proposal looked at. In fact, some projects required extensive participation before accepting students, though I think that has settled down in recent years now that the requirement went from "student" to "New in Open Source contributions"