Preparing for an internship

Hi,
I'm in third year of engineering school and will have to find an internship next year in the course of my studies. I'd like to work on machine learning but am unsure how to prepare.
Background: I know python, java, matlab, sql, and excel.

I've set myself a goal of implementing one ML algorithm a week. So I've been looking for papers that look fun and publishing my implementations on github.
Will this have any weight on my resume?

From reading this subreddit I've gathered that going to NIPS in december would be worthless at my level and that participating in Kaggle competitions would be a waste of time.
Are there other things I could be doing to become more attractive to potential employers?