I regret not bothering to put stupid/simple things on GitHub earlier than I did. In part because using GitHub is, in fact, particularly educational in itself. Getting used to using version control for your own stuff will make it drastically less painful when you are trying to follow the expectations of a large organization. I also find putting personal projects on GitHub encourages me to use best practices, like ensuring no personal data ends up in the code out of convenience and the like.
Building some sort of personal projects is an awesome way to force yourself to learn things (apart from digging in and helping with other people's projects), and I would encourage you to see if there's anything that would excite you to build, and then tell you to figure out how to build it.
Funny story, I studied for (and have my bachelor's in) game development, and I ended up choosing to work in the IT field, where I actually prefer for my Mon-Fri. (You've probably already realized this, but IT and dev have almost no shared skills whatsoever, and my degree was almost useless for my actual job.)
I've probably learned a lot more just screwing around with hobby code than I really did in school, and despite not being in class for it or doing dev for a living, I am writing more (and better) code than I was a year ago.
Lately one of the things that's often kicked off ideas/projects for me is the Succinctly ebook series from Syncfusion: https://www.syncfusion.com/ebooks It's mostly .NET-focused, but has a lot of very short, well-written introductions to a given topic or project type. I've only really dug into a couple of them so far, but every one has been a positive experience.
If you're trying to work for a FAANG (which you really shouldn't), you need to memorize all sorts of algorithms and related jargon mostly for the purposes of the interview, but for most jobs you just need to be able to look at a general thing you need to implement with code... and implement it with code.
