How many of us Sci-fi-ers are in science or high tech professions? Me? I'm currently in a pre-engineering program in college, hoping to be a NASA employee someday. (NASA pretty-much runs Huntsville, AL wich is only about 20 mins from my house...)

Im a software engineer.

If I told you what I did for a living, I'd have to kill you :-)

(Someone had to say it, LOL!)

So, Karen is a bad comic....anyone else?  ;)

I co-own and run (with my husband) a small construction company.

Well, I'm currently unemployed (which is why I can spend so much time here) but my degree is in Public Health Policy and Bioethics.

bioethics.....like stem cell research policy and stuff?

Not me, I'm an administrative assistant/secretary for a commercial RE appraiser, I've been an elementary teacher, worked as customer service/data/secretary at a life insurance and also done administrative work for two different techonology leasing companies.  I've also been CS rep at a car store and a clerk at a card store.  Oh, in college I worked at a sandwich shop and at a fabric store. 

Yep, like stem cell research policy and stuff. When I was little I wanted to be an astrophysicist, but found in high school that actually doing physics was extraordinarily boring. So I moved over to the ethics and policy side of things in college, and the most fascinating subjects were those relating to life and death, hence the bioethics. :)

Unfortunately, I haven't yet found a job using my fancy new degree. . . so my actual experience has been doing office work, T.A.ing for an elementary school class, and managing retail. :(

Ha!  I'm a bank courier...the most high tech thing I've ever seen is a counterfeit $100.

LOL Matt!  I work at a credit union.  Most of the forgeries I've seen in my time are checks and money orders.  Some of them are really good work, too!  You have to wonder what these people could accomplish if they put their talents to the benefit of society instead!

For many years I was an English Professor. When I wasn't grading 500 word themes, I wrote as a matter of professional survival, "scholarly papers."  Only one I ever read was worth reading. In College English (pretty prestigious journal, mostly about teaching same) there was a paper written by a young English prof at either MIT or Cal Tech. His students, obviously, were extremely bright, high-tech oriented, male. He was perplexed that they paid little attention to his favorites, Faulkner, Hemingway, Conrad, etc. He asked them if they read any fiction voluntarily. Sure, they readily volunteered ---sci-fi. He was dumfounded. Why? There is no literary quality ,no depth, to any sci-fi. You just don't get it, they all chimed in. Those old white dudes you like to read--that stuff is depressing. Folks all screwed up in the head, drunks, queers, frustrated soldiers, and a world going to hell in a handbasket. We read sci-fi, because it deals with the possible. We don't care so much for abnormal psychology or whatever else it is you call character development. We care about ideas. We don't argue with the old drunk who said the past isn't dead, it isn't even past. We are simply more interested in the future.

for what it's worth.

I don't post often but I thought I would jump in on this one. I'm a maintenance supervisor in a chemical plant. Not a science type job, but an interesting one.

I own a Telecommunications contracting company.  We install cable, fiber optics, networks for AtM's, sound systems for commercial buildings and businesses and tele-com equipment of all types.   We sub for about 40 national account companies.  I also own a subscriber Voice Mail and Pager business with about 1,000 customers. 

Last but not least, I own a company that sells reproductions of religious icons.   www.fatherbill.org

I'm a technical editor and writer for a company that creates documentation (mostly operations, maintenance, and parts list manuals) for the U.S. government and some commercial customers.  So I guess technical, but not high tech!

And if anyone needs an experienced editor and is willing to pay me an outlandish salary, feel free to get in touch. I'm willing to relocate, if necessary. =)

I'm a biomedical engineer; have been working in design and development of magnetic resonance imaging sytems and applications for about 20 years now.  My day to day work is more like a project manager these days, though.  I like to tell people that in MRI, the scanner spins up a lot of protons in their bodies according to fancy patterns, and then watches how they fall back down.  Sort of like the man at the circus spinning plates on sticks.    Ha ha.   Seriously though, it really bugs me when an sf writer looks up a few words of cool physics vocabulary, and doesn't take the time to understand the concepts.   It's ok to write in a way such that the scientific details aren't important, but to spew out a bunch of inaccurate mumbo jumbo is not.

-Tom Hl.

I'm an IT Specialist now. I used to be a computer programmer/analyst but they changed our titles and I changed my specialty.

I started as a school Librarian then they opened a computer lab.  I taught computer applications at that school for 6 years then moved on to another school and another computer lab for another 6 years.  Both schools were for high risk students who LOVED working on computers.