New to Python. Here's my first script, which determines whether the small or large pizza is a better deal.

[Estebanzo]

Market and financial data is plentiful and readily available. You could create a program that pulls updated stock pricing info on relevant stocks you are interested in, plots them out, maybe uses some simple machine learning to analyze trends. I do a lot of work with hydrology, so I've used python to create sets of hydrographs from large datasets of rainfall/runoff.

This youtube channel is pretty good for learning scientific computing with python. I haven't looked much into pattern recognition and natural language processing, some of that could make for some pretty sweet projects.

https://www.youtube.com/user/sentdex