My current situation is that I'm a PhD student in computer science at the University of Virginia and have been so for probably far too long. For fun and profit I work as a research assistant (fancy title for graduate student) on the Legion project, a wide-area distributed computing system. My dissertation research focuses on resource allocation issues in such a distributed computing environment. Of particular interest to me is developing ways to make it easy for application developers to tailor the scheduling process to their application's needs. Anyway, if this sort of thing interests you, check out my publications and my vita.
I'm originally a northern Jersey boy, which means that it is my birthright to own a red IROC in which to cruise the strip at Seaside Park and to have an outrageous accent. I've been out of the state long enough that my accent is pretty much gone and well, I never really liked IROCs anyway.
I fled, er, left Jersey to go to college at Penn. This is where I learned important things like what the heck is a Quaker and how to drink lots of grain punch without falling down (well, usually). My car and house were broken into so often that I knew the police on a first name basis. Somewhere along the way I managed to get a business degree from Wharton without taking a single management course or really being imbued with the business killer instinct.
After Penn, I moved to Northern Virginia and joined the working world as a systems consultant, which means my job description read something like "perform any task remotely related to computers that someone will pay us for". I worked at a company called American Management Systems and spent about half my life in such resorts as Newark, NJ and Fort Wayne, Indiana. And some people asked me when I left why I wanted to go back to school, sheesh!
And finally... In 1991, I moved down to lovely, scenic Charlottesville, VA for grad school. What started out as a 2 year hitch has turned into a career in its own right. It will be interesting to see how(if?) it ends...