I landed a pretty sweet gig on campus. My program has an office called the Global Information Industry Center, which does research on IT stuff for a lot of companies including corporate sponsors like IBM and Cisco.
I joined that team this week, and I made myself useful already by proofreading a final report that's going out to press in the next couple of weeks. Once it's out, I'll link the finished product. It's basically a census of all the "information" that's floating around out there, whether digitally or in print or on TV.
From here on, I'll probably be focusing my research on gaming issues, which should be a lot of fun while building some valuable experience at the same time. The plans are really preliminary, but I might be looking into systems like OnLive to see if they're really feasible. In theory, I'll be starting a research blog, which will be boring and dry but might be interesting to the gamers among us.
I've always been driven by solving problems in gaming. I tried to do it as a writer and wasn't very effective, but when big companies are pouring money into your work, they tend to listen. I'm pretty psyched for the chance to really try to actually solve some problems.