Jobs I might have liked.

Bill Nye, on his show for kids, used to have a feature called "Way Cool Scientist" in which he featured some interesting science-related job.

(My memory is that often the "Way Cool Scientists" were actually engineers or technicians, and I was a little bit annoyed that they all got lumped together).  

(Also I would like to argue with They Might Be Giants's album Here Comes Science for the same reason. Didn't they notice that several of the songs are about engineering or technology?  But.  I digress.)

Anyway, every once in a while I come across some cool kind of research, and I always think about it as "Maybe I should have majored in that." 

Here is a nifty slideshow about a cool bit of linguistic field research.  It looks just like the sort of thing I would have liked to study, if I had been a linguist instead of a chemical engineer.   I know, I know, these things always look a lot more glamorous when they're done than when they begin, usually with a lot of very tedious background research, trying to figure out what's already been done and what's left to figure out.  Actually the beginning can maybe be more exciting than the middle part, when the annoying intractable little problems start to crop up in earnest.  What I'm getting at is that I'm aware that when NSF decides to make a nifty slideshow about your research, they are cherry-picking the nifty parts on purpose, and editing out all the non-nifty parts, so that people will look at it and think:  Cool!  Let's make sure the government keeps giving money to the Nifty Science Foundation!  Still:  nifty.

h/t Literal-Minded, in a post worth reading on its own and that explains a little more about linguistic clicks.

(Disclosure:  My own doctoral research was funded partly by the NSF.)