I used to work at National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, CO. Everyone in my office had engineering or science degrees. The projects were all fascinating. Ther

I used to work at National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, CO. Everyone in my office had engineering or science degrees. The projects were all fascinating. There were almost no people with clearances (nor any need for them) in Golden - I wanted to get one back then in order to break into the Defense industry. If you are able to get one, I strongly recommend getting one. If you have an engineering degree, I strongly recommend looking into getting your PE license. It might be worthless to you, but as a federal employee, it will get you a bump up in pay. I think that in the future, there will be some sort of licensing for developers (or at least for team leads), so this would be useful. Among other things, NREL has the lab that tests all of the windmills in the US. There is this squirrely little canyon that gets really weird winds. Almost every day, so you don't have to wait months to get gale/storm winds. There will be a number of safety training videos shown when you start. We made fun of them: "rattlesnakes are not your friends" or "you and your fire extinguisher". There are lots of paths for walking and rattlesnakes like to get warm in the sun. Please don't pet them. I know they're cute (well, I think they're cute), but they are pretty scared of anything big enough to eat them. Even though we made fun of the videos, everyone was a result of someone else getting badly hurt, so they're important. The biggest threat to the group I worked with was Congress. Due to a hostile R-Congress, the budget for DOE was cut by about 30%. I expect similar things this year from the crowd in this Congressional session. The excuses for the cutbacks at that previous time was hostility towards Energy Star and conservation programs of any kind. Public transit to/from the NREL campus is available. Denver has a pretty good public transit system.