I can actually +1 this. While I was getting my degree I worked in various departments at my university (I'm not the kind of person who can study without workin

I can actually +1 this. While I was getting my degree I worked in various departments at my university (I'm not the kind of person who can study without working, so I worked pretty much full time). I worked in Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy and even in the computer services group. Astronomy was probably the most fun because I wrote code to animate star fields with the planetarium projector. Lots of math! Downsides are that sometimes (well... lots of times) they need you to do trivial things. Often you are working with some stinky piece of code that a grad student wrote in fortran 10 years ago and that another grad student rewrote in C -- transliterating the design from one language to another. Nobody understand software development practices, so it's cowboy time every day (unless you are good at managing it yourself). And the pay is generally pretty low :-) Still it is probably the most fun I've ever had and I would go back if I was anywhere near a university.