I have had considerable good fortune in finding interesting things to do. While in high school I obtained a summer programming job working on the lunar lander. As an undergraduate at Tufts University (BSEE) I worked on eye movement research for Sam McLaughlin. Upon graduation, I went to work for Digital Equipment Corporation as a hardware design engineer. I designed stepper motor control modules, a PDP-8 direct numerical control for real time control of two machine tools and part of the cpu for the PDP-14. I went back to school at Northeastern University to obtain a master's degree (MSEE). At IBM's Watson Research Center, I worked in the Experimental Systems Group on the structure of programming languages (on a database query language and the analysis of cooking recipes).
During my tenure as a graduate student in the Center for Visual Science at the University of Rochester, I was able to find many interesting things to do in vision research. We (with Mike Mancini) were the first to apply white noise analysis to mammalian cortex. We obtained measures of the nonlinearities in the cells of primary visual cortex (cat). My thesis was 'A Theory of Spatial Acuity' and I owe a huge debt to Chris Brown for shepherding it to completion. I created a physiologically- and psychophysically-based computational model of the discrimination of suprathreshold stimuli. The theory was able to reconcile the order of magnitude greater sensitivity of human observers to vernier stimuli with that of normal acuity measures. While a postdoc at Rochester in the Computer Science Department with Chris Brown and Jerry Feldman, I worked on acquiring vision hardware for the robotics laboratory and on extending my computational model to problems in intermediate vision. While in Rochester I also had the opportunity to work in industrial research laboratories on image quality at Eastman Kodak and Xerox (twice).
While at Boeing's Advanced Computing Technology Resource Center, I developed a vision system to locate fixtures under a robotic gantry and worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology on geometric dimensioning standards. At the present time I am affiliated with the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania where all sorts of interesting things are being done.