What to do?

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I am currently stuck on a Uni placement and it's starting to really get to me. I am currently hired as a software developer for a Military based R&D department to give you an idea of the background. (Lot's of big personality types etc).

Basically, i've been hired as a software developer for 1 year (until September before I go back to uni) and I haven't had much at all in the way of software developing. I basically have nothing to do for 9 hours a day apart from about 5 - 10 minutes of easy, meaningless maintenance tasks. There's only so much surfing the internet I can do before and has already become a chore. Having no work to do now leads me to become very easily distracted / annoyed by co-workers etc that I wouldn't care as much about if I had any work to absorb myself into, leading to me burning out very quickly lately. Just end up shutting down and blaring music on my headphones all day. Our department has no money at all for any projects so why they hired me as a softdev is beyond me now. I am stuck here until September as its part of my uni course. People say "oh great, you get paid to do nothing!", doing nothing gets old very quickly and doesn't really help much in the way of advancing my career. What would you do if you had 8 hours a day 5 days a week to do next to nothing with? Some days I would like to just quit, the whole structure of this corporation is a sham.

Dude, Suck up to the boss.
Do everything you can do and ask for more work.
Make yourself indispensable even if it is only making coffee for people.

You have a foothold in government R&D.
Scratch a toehold and you will have a well paid job for life.