It's a long game, but building what you're interested in, even if it's the boring parts of what you're interested in, can get you noticed. Due to writing drivers and tools for people to use different hardware, I've now worked in/with:

- Robotics (via working on open source educational robotics stuff)

- Virtual Worlds (via making hardware to interact with them)

- Health Devices (via reverse engineering health devices)

- Neuroscience (via reverse engineering eegs)

- Haptics (via reverse engineering haptics controllers. Noticing a trend here?)

- Digital/Interactive Art (via writing Max/Puredata/OpenFrameworks/Processing plugins for aforementioned projects)

- Teledildonics (via [censored])

(My github is at http://github.com/qdot, where you can witness the ADHD firsthand)

And the list grows every time I start working with a new library or device. Most of my dayjobs tagentially relate to something I've worked on in my spare time, though I try to keep from taking a job that'd completely subsume any one interest, as that tends to be a permanent mood killer (I'm looking at you, popular virtual world company that crushed my VW dreams).

So yeah, just find what you're interested in, do something in it, try to be part of a community around it, and let things work naturally.

Then comes the hard part: Tying all of this back together via /you/. You can make neat stuff all day long but if you can't tie it together with your own personality, then you're just a person who aimlessly cranks out neat stuff, which is something that will worry employers. Presenting a complete and coherent package of all the stuff you're interested in and why you're interested in it, with proof that you can do (more importantly: finish) it and show how that can benefit others is really the key. But damn, is it ever hard to get there.

PS stay the hell out of teledildonics. That is MY TURF.