I sat around with a desire to “make an open source contribution” for years. Followed the advice about looking through bug trackers for tractable issues. Never could make heads or tails of a project.

Then at work I become an ambitious user of a relatively immature open source platform. As a power user, I finally had real motivation to fix specific defects, and a good enough mental map to get it done. It came naturally.

Won't this mean that those projects' maintainers will suddenly get a random influx of half-baked pull requests, which are somehow tied to a grade? This sounds a little too close to the "term papers must be good enough to be submitted to conferences" anti-pattern.