Dries Buytaert, lead of the Drupal project, invited students on his blog to participate in Google's Summer of Code and at the same time help improve the Drupal core.  This is Google's third year for the program which hopes to encourage college students to work on open source projects.  Chris Dibona, Open Source Program Manager at Google, wrote:

Last year we paid 630 students from 450 schools in 90 countries $4,500 each to work on open source software projects. These projects, selected by some 100 open source mentoring organizations from over 6,000 applications, provided students with invaluable real-world programming experience.

For the Summer of Code 2007, Google is hoping to accept an additional 200 students and add additional open source projects to its program.   I should also add that not only does the participating student collect money from Google, but participating open source projects mentoring the student will also collect $500 at the end of summer.

Back to Drupal, Buytaert suggested five ideas students may want to consider for improving the Drupal core while applying for the Summer of code.

1. Improved file handling
2. Hierarchical page structuring
3. Lightweight image/asset management
4. Streamlined installation procedure
5. Improved data models

A more detailed description behind those ideas can be found on Buytaert's blog.  If you do not have an interest in working with the Drupal content management system, you still may want to consider participating in the Summer of Code while working on another open source project.  A complete list of open source projects participating as mentors to the Google Summer of Code can be found by clicking here.