I appreciate your response, and I agree that upon reflection this pretty much is the standard man-up answer. That being said the only other way I know to get stuff accomplished is throw money at the problem, not typically an option for devs straight out of college.

I understand what you're saying when you say it's daunting, but this doesn't have to be a big deal. I'm not advocating someone run right out and start cutting kernel patches straight out of school. The Open Source space is enormous and it should be possible to pick a project that's in line with your abilities. Example: there are at least three CMS projects I know of that are well documented and very accessible to new developers looking to help out.