I'm working on a Ph.D. in videogame studies, coming into it from a BA and MA in humanist media studies. I'm currently about halfway through (at least that's what my contract says, heh 
), and thankfully I'm lucky enough to come from a country where Ph.D. research is actually recognized as labor and treated as a job, meaning I don't have to rely on grants, scholarships, parental support or side jobs to get by.
My experience is that I'm often a bit of an odd one out in computer hardware/gaming circles with my interest in this not being linked to much interest in programming, math or natural sciences, but instead in humanist questions of how these things affect us as people, how they convey meaning (or how we use them to convey meaning), how they fit into (and in turn shape) our lives, how we make use of them in various contexts, etc. Luckily the field of game studies, even if it is extremely interdisciplinary, has quite a few people sharing those interests.
I'm still a complete rookie in what I do (no matter if my advisers keep telling me otherwise), but I'm pretty much set on taking this as far as it can go. There aren't many job opportunities outside of academia, but research is what I want to do and keep doing, as I think understanding how videogames affect us and shape our lives and societies is an extremely important field of study now and in the future.
My job doesn't relate to SFF directly in any way, though it obviously relates heavily to computers in general. I've been building, using and playing on PCs since I was in my early teens, and my journey into SFF mostly grew out of sheer exhaustion at the size of mainstream PCs and how difficult they were to fit into my living conditions - at one point during my studies my desktop PC sat unused in storage for a year as there was no way to fit it into my apartment. I'm also generally a fan of DIY projects (though please don't ask me how many of them I ever finish!), and I like the general idea of space efficiency and compact living, which means I don't mind the extra work of building something compact even if there's extra effort involved. It's definitely a rather snobbish attitude, but huge PCs definitely rub me the wrong way - I always find they dominate the room (a big humming box will do that), and given how PCs work these days I don't see any real advantages with larger form factors.
