I'm a CIS major about to enter my junior year, I still have the same problem that many of codeacademy's students do. I've done a couple of programming classes (which I aced) and dozens of tutorials but I don't have a clue where to begin when it comes to actually designing a useful program.
So think of something simple but fun and useful that you'd like to put together.
For example...this isn't a "first project" for me but it showed me how something simple, to a coder, could be very popular to others; this list of free museums/attractions and their free hours:
The data-gathering part, I did it in the painful old-fashioned visit-every-webpage fashion...but only because I needed to figure out the domain of the issue.
If I were to do this again, I would start with the list of Facebook pages, throw that into Google Spreadsheets.
Then, I'd write the script that would read the spreadsheet for the Facebook IDs, use the Facebook Graph API to scrape the address/hours/summary info, and from there, move to batch geocoding (the Google Geocoder API exercise) and maybe some simple text-processing to auto-figure out if a museum has listed free hours (i.e. search for the div that contains a day/hours listing and the word "free")
And you could also use the Facebook API to get a list of events from each place, though that varies widely by organization and if they have a social media maintainer.
As you get better at coding, you'll find that the hardest step is the first step, collecting the Facebook ID (or whatever piece of data that you start out with)
I agree with what envex said, but would add that if you don't start doing something withing a few weeks of going through these courses, you'll forget almost everything. As they say "use it or lose it".
