One standard piece of advice to students has been to "do what you love". And of course it's great to love what you do. But my own top piece of advice is different: consider consequences and alternatives. One fairly predictable consequence of your career choice is your income.
This might be important to you if you hope to make the world a better place. Since it may not be obvious why, I give a few links to philosophers now busy advocating earn-and-donate as a superior moral choice. Your income might be important to you for other reasons as well. For example, a friend put it to me once that his parents deserved to see a good return on their investment in his education.
I find that people are often surprised by readily available income data. In the wake of the expiry of the Bush tax cut for those with incomes over $250,000, there was ample discussion of who was rich. One economist, whose blog I recommend, wrote that the typical rich family was a police officer married to a nurse.
Of course, being an economist, he eviscerated people's economic misperceptions and went on to make a case for restructuring the tax system into a progressive consumption tax. But my point here is simpler: I find that many people are surprised by what nurses earn, and have no knowledge of what salaries are possible in a range of professions.
A nurse in a major city, say San Francisco, will earn very roughly $50 per hour (or $100,000 per year for 50 40-hour weeks), not including benefits, overtime, or shift differential. Including all these effects and then considering only the top earners gets you headlines like this.
You can do your own research on typical salaries, benefits, and working conditions in various professions. The curious may wish to look up their professors' salaries on See Through NY, but I can tell you that the numbers are not so exciting. Police officers make salaries roughly comparable to those of nurses. There's lots of material out there on salaries for every profession. Software developers are in the news often, with attendant commentary.
My point here is that the salaries are not obvious. You have to do the research to find out that hardware engineers don't earn nearly as much as software engineers. And the results of this research might be important to you.
One last thing, before you rush off to make $100,000 a year in San Francisco: someone there with this kind of income will not consider themselves rich. In fact, they might argue that "lower-middle-class" is closer to the mark. Also, you have to get the job before you can earn the income.