I am a senior CS/Math student at UMD, college park, and I "specialized" my major in machine learning. I have taken courses on Deep Learning and NLP, reinforcement learning, however I still feel like a novice in all of these categories, my proudest achievement being this half-ripped off sudoku CNN I trained that only achieved like 90% accuracy. 

All that being said I want to contribute to the ever progressing world of AI and ML, and I want to know where I should even begin. I would be entirely fine being sent on a super random and likely incorrect path, just to rule out that a method does not work. 

I have deliberated beginning my own projects trying to create Transformer networks or RL implementations, but it all feels a little daunting and arguably useless. Who am I to be able to work alone and come up with something truly useful in heavily researched fields.

What should I work on. Where can someone like myself, who is not currently pursuing further education or research get involved and help the ML/AI society?

P.S. shoutout Lex Fridman and Eliezer Yudkowsky, without their recent podcast together I do not think I would have found this platform.