If you want to do something less buzzwordy with lots of real-life applications, look into distributed systems. Try running an Apache big data project yourself and write some programs/queries for it, try making a change to the project to do something cool. My suggestion to check out an Apache big data project is just that it gives you a good place to learn, not so you can be a "hadoop specialist" or anything like that.

There is way more real world usage of the distributed systems concepts and skills you'd learn there (especially in large tech companies) than any other flavor of the month. While ML is also commonly used in the industry, the signal:noise is really bad, because a lot of its uses are superfluous buzzword-driven development. However, many many companies rely on distributed systems to be able to operate at scale.