During the summer I spent at TI, my team was in the middle of a very uninteresting phase of work. Applications teams get to do a lot of cool, hands-on stuff, but while I was there, they were preparing documentation, tweaking software tools, generating header files, etc.--extremely tedious, logistical tasks that could almost be done by a team of fairly knowledgeable high school students. Apparently I was just unlucky, because I met about 100 other co-ops who were doing interesting stuff.
Seems like a bad move to put co-ops or new grads on teams that are doing mind-numbing work... the real value of a co-op is not their work, but their potential as a future employee. Even though I got a chance to see that TI is a cool place, my experience left a bad taste in my mouth.