University of Sheffield students don't have access to a culture of open source contribution in the outer community. HackSheffield, CompSoc, and the mainline Computer Science course itself do not make a focus of bringing developer skills to the outer community. Right now, the focus lies in teaching the fundamentals themselves, but bringing these to the wider community is something that I have personally found difficult, as have others. There's this vague statement of 'find a project that's got "help wanted" attached and get contributing', but there are so many questions surrounding that - the scale of the undertaking, whether one knows enough about the language to do what's required in the right way, and naturally, that daunting feeling of being so small in comparison to the scope of some projects and the faces behind them.
This is a problem I still have personally, and it is one that has been recognised by the society. It needs some power behind it to be tackled, however. I'd like to make