I took a freshman engineering class in college that was more of a survey class. It was taught by the Dean of the College of Engineering at the school(and was the only class he taught) He stressed to us in the science disciplines that you should follow your heart, do what you love, and the $$$ will follow. His biggest case in point was in his professional carreer he had changed jobs 7 times, and every time he accepted less $$$ than he was making when he left his old job. He said within a year or two, he was always making more than what he had left.

I recently was forced to change jobs (company relocated). I took about the same $$$ as a salary as I was making before (actually less) if you count the >40 hours I got billed. I took the position because I knew a lot of people that worked there and they really liked the work place environment and they were using unix which I really wanted to play with in a production environment. In the short time(< 6 months) I have been there I have received one raise, and have a salary review this summer. MORAL = do what you want to, try to have fun at what you are doing, let the $$$ work itself out. :-)