Peace, Love, and all that hippy stuff: robotics career outside the defense industry?

[Katy]

I guess I'm a pretty typical story. I did FIRST in highschool, and mentored FLL, mentored FRC in college and MCed a little, and now I am graduating and looking for a job.

Oh the things you must post delicately when you know you are not anonymous on the internet.

I've got friends who serve in the military and, if somehow drafted, I too would serve. I really want to press home the distinction between the military and the defense industry because I view them as two totally separate concepts. I've got some serious ethical complications with working for the defense industry. I do not support some of the economic practices which keep this industry afloat (can we say military industrial complex?). I don't view this industry as evil, and I don't think any less of the people who choose that life for themselves. I simply don't want to put myself in a situation where I have a conflict of interest between the things I believe are good for the world and what needs to happen for me to earn a living. This life may be right for many people, but I have a growing certainty that it is not right for me.

I'm graduating a CS major and hope to be employed in the field of robotics. I've done a lot of interviews with firms that have many divisions (one medical equipment, commercial avionics, and military avionics, another company does work for a large number of non-military government branches as well as the military ones) but, for whatever reason, I always wind up sitting across the table from an interviewer who wants me to work for the military division of the company, and consequently that is where the offer letters come from.

I can not be the only one who this dealt with this issue. Does anybody know a list of robotics (particularly software/embedded) employers who do non-defense work? I'm checking around currently for non-profits and research labs as they don't have the same sort of economic ties to this system, but there has to be a way to view this field that is not in varying shades of defense industry.

I'm frankly shocked how much of the robotics field is military-related.

Has anybody else had this issue? How did you solve it?