Learn when and how to use different data structures and their algorithms in your own code. This is harder as a student, as the problem assignments you'll work through just won't impart this knowledge.

"SeqAn (www.seqan.de) is an open-source C++ template library (BSD license) that implements many efficient and generic data structures and algorithms for Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) analysis. It ...

Over at Dr. Dobbs, Rob Farber writes that, when used correctly, atomic operations can help implement a wide range of generic data structures and algorithms in the massively threaded GPU programming ...