If you have the time, reach out to professors and ask if they have internships at their lab. If you have the financial resources, you can mention that you’re not looking to get paid. Again, this will work best if you already have some previous research you can show that attests to your research ability.

In my case, I did research on my own before reaching out to potential advisors. They were all impressed by me having published papers on my own. I want to emphasize that publishing on your own isn’t difficult especially if you target conferences that are lower tier (look up ML conferences by acceptance rates) or workshops at top conferences (CVPR, NeurIPS, etc). You don’t even have to publish, having a high quality paper on the arXiv is often good enough.

That would be my recommendation to you. DO NOT wait for a mentor to take you under his wing or a professor to “help” you with research. They will not do that. Most of them are super busy and are looking for someone who can immediately jump in on a project and know what to do. I promise you that you’re smart enough to start doing research now, and if you start now it will be immensely easier for you to get opportunities 5-6 months from now.