I want to leave behind a note on NIST: If you are a student in informatics, or even early in your career, and you want to try making open source contributions for some experience related to:
- user experience: by improving documentation and demonstration
- design and analysis: by contributing visualizations
- development: by editing and testing code
- cybersecurity: by contributing to policy or information modeling
There is opportunity to do so. If you are interested, I can give you more information, or you can explore on your own at: https://github.com/usnistgov/. Specifically, you can take a look at https://pages.nist.gov/OSCAL/contribute/ and learn a bit about OSCAL.
I volunteered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service while I was in college, and it gave me a taste of working in federal service before I fully understood what that meant. It was an opportunity to encounter other people, find my first mentor who taught me quite a bit about getting started in federal service, and to get some experience where I needed it.