If you want to work with data, Hadoop might not be a bad idea, but in reality you run into the experience chicken-egg problem: You're not going to be able to ge

If you want to work with data, Hadoop might not be a bad idea, but in reality you run into the experience chicken-egg problem: You're not going to be able to get access to the datasets you need to get experience with the datasets that you need experience with until you have experience with large data sets! I would look for an open source project that has data manipulation needs (LibreOffice might be a good start) or some free and huge data sources (National Weather Service has a ton) and see if you can be of assistance there. I would also recommend trying to take on some freelance work in mobile or web programming (low barrier to entry, lots of small projects available). Do some small projects for your local NPOs for free, or become involved in some way. Many people will tell you to go the OSS route, but to be honest it can be very intimidating to contribute to an OSS project, and generally the turnaround is slow. The github pull request lifecycle is approximately 100 years.