Not sure whether to take classes or do an independent study as a student potentially transferring

A little bit of background about my situation - currently a sophomore at a a top tier US school with a meh CS program although for some reason it's top 20 ranked (probably just has to do with the prestige of the school), considering transferring a not as highly ranked state school but with a better/on par CS program.

This semester I took a leave of absence to take a step back to clear my head regarding my decision about staying or transferring. I've decided to go back in the spring but submit transfer apps before I go so that if I still don't like it I have the option to transfer.

During this semester I've been taking a data structures and discrete math class a local university. My normal school's CS department won't accept the data structures class for transfer credit bc it's department policy that every CS major has to take the school's data structures class. Unfortunately, every other CS class has this data structures class as a prerequisite and the professors I've asked have said it's a very strong pre-req - it's possible to take one of these classes without having taken the data structures class, but the professors are either not going to allow it or put up a bit of a fight.

The schools on my transfer list will accept the data structures class as transfer credit though, so in my mind it's a waste of money to take my normal school's DS class if there's a good chance I don't end up staying at the school.

Given the difficulty of taking any other CS class, I was thinking about doing an independent study. This summer I did research with CERN which was basically all data science and programming. I'm planning on continuing the research with my professor I was working with in the spring regardless, but I figured I might as well make an independent study out it and get credit for it! The benefits of this are that it would count as credit towards the major at my school if I choose to stay and I'm pretty sure the same is true for the schools I'm looking at transferring to. More importantly, I don't have any side projects and didn't get a chance to get super in--depth with my research this summer (most of the time was getting familiar with the science part and the proprietary data analysis framework that CERN uses) so my resume could definitely be stronger. This is probably the most important thing to me given how important internships are for getting jobs after college - my logic is that if I can spend a semester going all out on this research I'll have plenty of code to show off, which will strengthen my resume, allowing me to get a better internship next summer hence setting me up to be in a good position for recruiting my senior year. The downside of this, however, is that I'll be missing out on learning more about CS from a theoretical standpoint - if I don't do an independent study I'd probably take a Computer Architecture class or Intro to the Design & Analysis of Algorithms class, which are beneficial I'm sure, but I feel like actual experience is more worthwhile.

What do you guys think? Any advice/input or suggestions to help me make this decision?

TLDR: considering transferring, current school is super stingy about everyone taking one class which is a prereq for all other CS classes even though I took the equivalent at another school, considering doing an independent study continuing research writing software with CERN (which is very data science and programming heavy) instead.

Thanks!