Where are you geographically? Why not work for a bio-tech or a physics related firm? They need good coders. If you're in San Francisco Bay Area (or want to be

Where are you geographically? Why not work for a bio-tech or a physics related firm? They need good coders. If you're in San Francisco Bay Area (or want to be in Bay Area, perhaps you could finish your degree at Stanford/UCSC/SJSU/SFSU/SCU?) and know (or would like to learn) Perl, C (and some Java), there's a really interested job opening I found on a local Perl mailing list. It's related to bioinformatics, which is different from your background but nonetheless would be something that "keep you sharp". Another option that's even more closely related to what you're doing now is perhaps picking up machine learning/NLP/information retrieval. It's very heavy on (mostly continous) mathematics/numerical analysis. I have a feeling somewhere that you're probably pretty good with dealing with sparse matrices, graphs and the like. There's tons of Internet/e-commerce companies doing more and more with that.