Magdelena Ridge Site Characterization
As an undergraduate I worked for the Magdelena Ridge Observatory, mainly as a instrumentation engineer. The MRO will be an optical interferometer of 10 1.4m telescopes at 13,000ft just west of Socorro, NM .
During my time there I made measurements of the boundary layer turbulence that hurt the seeing. We created a new kind of device that measured the difference between two spatially seperated electret microphones. A sort of pet idea of my advisor's. 
I wrote miles of MATLAB code to process the high time cadence data we were taking, trying to see typical turbulence spectral features like a power law distribution.
Together with other physics undergrads we completely reverse engineered existing instruments, upgraded to new electronics, and redesigned the physical implimentation to a truely field usable system. Almost all of which was probably discarded soon after we left in favor of better understood hot-wire anemometry.
But we had fun, got to go up to the mountain alot, and got a free trip the SPIE conference in Glasgow. See the abstract to the paper here.
Things I learned there:
Embedded systems (assembly, microcontroller logic)
MATLAB, lots of MATLAB my lingua franca
electronics, pcb design
documentation (eg how NOT to leave a project)
management (how to get things done and stay friends)
time management
and... how to hit a giant metal spike with a printer from three stories up (Lean waaay out to drop it)
Trebuchets
During this same time, my friends and I designed and built a large scale steel and aluminum Trebuchet, a medieval siege weapon for busting into castles. Ours was constructed of junk from what is likely the best university property yard in the world. The arm is an aluminum I beam, the counterweight is sheets of explosively welded armor plating. We could throw a 20 pound rock about 400 feet with about 2 foot (sigma) precision. For the time being one can still catch it on the NMT Physics Club website.
Rocket Cars
Nuff said.
Citation mapping
Academic literature is exploding.
Spencer Weart summarizes the problem quite well in his article "Trend-spotting: Physics in 1931 and today"
"A quick way to compare the situations then and now is to look at the Physical Review. The most obvious difference is size. Last year's volumes take up about 30 times as much shelf space as did the two 1931 volumes—not to mention that the pages have gotten bigger and the print smaller. To be sure, the 1931 student also had to read Zeitschrift für Physik and Nature. Even so, the student could have read every important article in the field. Today such breadth is out of the question; dozens of subfields each publish more than the entire physics community did back then. To get an overview of physics nowadays, you must read review journals; scan news stories in Science, Nature, and PHYSICS TODAY; and—that old standby—talk with professors."
This is a project that I hope people smarter than I will solve. My complaint about current academic search engines like NASA ADS, LANL arxive, and google scholar is that the search results are too flat. A keyword search results in a list sorted by a complicated algorithm that might take into account word frequency, seperation distance, connectedness between cited links, and a whole host of things. However what the search cant tell you is what you might be missing by using the wrong phrases. Academic literature uses citations for a reason. What I would like to see is a search engine that displays its results graphically in a user friendly graph that allows the user to select different display modes (context grouping, co-citation grouping, author\topic highlighting, 2d\3d representation, interactive navigation).
At first I thought I could get some of this done myself. I wrote a perl script that retrieves two citation or reference lists from NASA ADS entries and finds their intersection. The answers the question "what articles did both of my papers of interest cite" or "what articles reference both of my papers of interest" . These metrics measure co-citation.
It worked
well but it was an itty bitty baby step in a large problem. Maybe by
next update of this page google or NASA will step up to the plate! In
my estimation Tim Brody at Citebase is probably the closest, he recently added cocitation and coreferencing, just like my crummy little perl script but much nicer.