I was pretty bored with CS by the time I was a Junior. Like Wonderless said, the coursework involves writing the same programs written thousands of times by other students. I sorted lists and searched data a myriad of ways. I wrote an assembler, a small compiler, a CPU emulator, and a virtual memory manager. I implemented stacks, queues, linked-lists, B-Trees, etc.
One of my instructors remembered me as a clever programmer and recommended me for a research assistant position in the CS dept. My first task was to write a program to compress contour isoplots. These are the things they lay over maps to show areas with different temperatures, pressures, etc. The work was funded by the Navy and my program compressed some plots over 300-1 (with some distortion though). It was a lot of fun because it was a technique nobody ever tried before so we didn't know exactly how well it would work. I did some more image compression work with DCT (using some of the same techniques later used in JPEG) and DPCM. My next task was rewriting and tuning some programs written by a mathematician so they would run faster; her programs worked but ran so slowly that they were impractical because she didn't really understand how to write an efficient program. Through this job I got a job working for a consulting company that did work for the Navy in data compression, pattern recognition, and digital signal and image processing.
There may be some interesting things going on in your own department. Usually this type of thing is reserved for grad students but if you can win over a Professor or two you should be able to get into it. While I was still an undergraduate I presented a conference paper and helped write research proposals.
Take off the blinders of coursework and start doing real science. That's when the fun starts.
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I was pretty bored with CS by the time I was a Junior. Like Wonderless said, the coursework involves writing the same programs written thousands of times by other students. I sorted lists and searched data a myriad of ways. I wrote an assembler, a small compiler, a CPU emulator, and a virtual memory manager. I implemented stacks, queues, linked-lists, B-Trees, etc.
One of my instructors remembered me as a clever programmer and recommended me for a research assistant position in the CS dept. My first task was to write a program to compress contour isoplots. These are the things they lay over maps to show areas with different temperatures, pressures, etc. The work was funded by the Navy and my program compressed some plots over 300-1 (with some distortion though). It was a lot of fun because it was a technique nobody ever tried before so we didn't know exactly how well it would work. I did some more image compression work with DCT (using some of the same techniques later used in JPEG) and DPCM. My next task was rewriting and tuning some programs written by a mathematician so they would run faster; her programs worked but ran so slowly that they were impractical because she didn't really understand how to write an efficient program. Through this job I got a job working for a consulting company that did work for the Navy in data compression, pattern recognition, and digital signal and image processing.
There may be some interesting things going on in your own department. Usually this type of thing is reserved for grad students but if you can win over a Professor or two you should be able to get into it. While I was still an undergraduate I presented a conference paper and helped write research proposals.
Take off the blinders of coursework and start doing real science. That's when the fun starts.