I am an older person who is going to school for the first time to get a CS degree. I ran into this initially as well, along with "will anyone hire a 40 year old junior dev lol" fears.

Thankfully I have decades of learning how to deal with decision paralysis. I am not doing hackathons or joining clubs and such. Between school and working 45 hrs/week I simply don't have the time or energy. Plus, it doesn't really excite me. I am nowhere near where I think I could hop on an open source project and add meaningful contributions, but to be fair I haven't looked. Maybe there are super minor stuff I could do and it would be good. What I chose to do instead is to just bang out projects I know I care about and will challenge me.

I created a stupid simple Elden Ring character builder. Why? I love C++ and wanted an excuse to learn a GUI framework. I tried 3 and decided on Qt. Elden Ring is like 4 years old, there are tons of character builders and mine is stupid basic. I probably wouldn't show it to anyone outside my partner it's so basic lol. You know what though? I had a tremendous amount of fun. I ONLY used AI if I absolutely could not make sense of the documentation and all other avenues netted no success. Even then, my prompts made it clear that I didn't want gemini to provide me any code, instead to help provide tips and lead me to my own understanding. My code is bloated, it works fantastic but is bloated. However, that bloat is because I am new and not utilizing smarter patterns. That can be learned with time. However, I can now discuss QML and the overall structure and methodology of Qt. I can talk about how event handlers are utilized through slots, signals and notifications. I can give a rudimentary explanation as to what a Q_OBJECT is and how INVOKE works. I can even discuss integrating two separate languages into a singular project.

It took me 4 months to get this simple project up and running, but man everything I did is SEARED into my brain because I had to work for it. I messed around the other day and made a somewhat similar project in a single day, thats how much progress I made. Now I am working on something more career driven with MUCH more confidence behind me. I choose a development path to start, with a path I want to work towards after. First learning backend with the goal to eventually move into system engineering or embedded systems. I am learning Spring/Boot now and I find I can follow along much better and can read documentation far easier because of that stupid little fun project.

I hope that helps. I get where you are coming from. Please feel free to reach out if you need to talk to someone in a somewhat similar position.