I'm attending a course with some goat professors, that aim to teach this kind of things. Chances are, given it's a small course you won't produce anything of real value, but the aim should be to analyze 3 datasets from 3 different neurodegenerative diseases, find some common markers and eventually make a ml model to better diagnose people with these diseases. It's not exactly easy, but given it's a real world problem it's extremely motivating

(we've been also allowed to use a university vm with 3tb of ram and that's nice)