This is definitely a problem for a lot of people. When I was in grad school, I used to go to Hackathons a lot, build a cool working backend, but a ugly front end which just does the job and I never won anything until I forced myself to learn Angular and used bootstrap themes to scaffold a basic UI/UX.

Unless you have a friend who happens to be a front end engineer and who wants to work on side projects along with you, the best solution is to learn just enough to get by. Learn react or angular and learn how to customize existing free themes available out there.