Lets see...

Sony Interactive (got me kicked out of College and then laid me off)
Staples
Baby Gap (THE NIGHTMARES!)

What did I learn.. don't work if you have too get a food card and eat crap but don't work it ruins the fun of college.

I worked at the campus bookstore between classes during the day, and at a movie theatre at night.

By the way, being a projectionist at a movie theatre in a college town is the single greatest job on this, or any, planet.

I did some tutoring (of other college students, usually ones a year or two behind me in my major) when I was in college. It has ups and downs: the good students are typically the ones paying you themselves (i.e.: given how tight money is for most college kids, this usually suggests they really care), the bad ones are the ones whose parents threw money at them with a commandment to 'find a tutor to fix your grades'. :/ They often don't care (or just want you to do their work for them) and trying to beat learning into them will make you cry.

That said, it was somewhat rewarding to be able to take a few struggling CS folks and turn them into A-B students. Only major recommendation I'd have is try to get hooked up with a professional tutoring service if you can, it beats the hell out of trying to extract payments from slowpays/nopays on your own.

My current employer is balking at severancing me right now due to a buyout agreement where they'd have to pay me a good chunk of change. I don't have much to do so I'm going to start taking night classes and telling them I can't travel due to class. (Have to be nice so not to give cause though) They'll probably wait until January when the agreement runs out and have to sev me anyway or my non-compete goes poof. At least I'll get a jump on classes now. (And they still might come to their senses and dump me prior)

I did a couple of different things during school.

My first campus job was in the Recreation Administration (or Recreation & Leisure Studies) department. I answered phones, made copies, and thanks to my considerable computer skills, worked as the school's lowest-paid computer tech.

(By the way, a major like Rec Admin is a f--king JOKE. I've seen the exams, I made all the copies. I could have earned a degree by taking those tests without taking the classes. It's Business for Super-Dummies. All majors are most certainly not made equal During CSCI crunch time, I wondered if I had made the right choice...)

Later, I worked in the Advising offices on campus, fixing data input into a web app by advisors too dumb to use a keyboard, and could not be trusted to input data correctly, no matter how many times you taught them. I also did more office computer fixin' (no longer the lowest-paid tech though!) and wrote a new PHP/MySQL web app for storing advising records. I also got to watch the EOP (Educational Opportunities Program) walk students through college, because they couldn't be trusted to read a course catalog themselves. (Some low-income students took the opportunity and ran with it - for each of them, there were 20 that the program attempted to drag through school that had no business being there. Of course, this wasn't exactly unique to any one section of Fresno State ).

I also processed the school withdrawal forms. I kept the original withdrawal form of Patriots safety James Sanders when he left school for the draft.

Finally, I did some contract work with a small local medical company, helping to computerize some of their presentation materials and update their website and other random computer needs.

I did a number of things in school, but by far the one that was the best financially and schedule-wise was waiting tables. I worked at a fairly upscale Italian restaurant and would usually do Friday/Saturday evenings + 1 other evening during the week. The time flew by and the money/hour was double or triple what I brought in working retail/campus jobs. The impact on the weekend social life wasn't too bad - if I wanted to go out I just started a little later with a couple hundred dollars in my pocket. For me it was the ideal part-time job to give me some extra cash but not require huge amounts of time.

Hehehehe, pure comedy those.
I worked in the graphics lab and always loved it when people would put their zip disk in and it would be blank. "Did you have it near a magnetic source, such as a speaker or phone?" I would say. "No, I just kept it in my purse/backpack/pocket, next to my cell," they would reply. "Yes, the magnetics from the cell phone speaker fried your disk, did you make a backup?" Hahahaha, silly people, never keep you're entire semesters worth of projects on one disk.

The pay sucked, but I rigged it so that I was always on duty when I was in class, so I got paid for attending the class I was already going to be there for. Booya.

Gold farm sweatshop manager.

The best job I had in college was as a security guard at an industrial plant, decent pay w/ health care and I could do my homework all night. Try to find something in the afternoons/evenings because graveyards are tough.

The second best job I had was the most fun, a bartender. I got paid to stand around and talk sports all day. The downside was I had to break up barfights. But I got some great stories out of it.

First two years of college, I was a roofer. That sucked donkey dick.

Last three years of college, I was a waiter at Applebee's and CSR at Blockbuster. You might have to suck it up and get a night job doing something in retail. I recommend blockbuster's for the steady pay and the 5 free rentals a week, including games and pre-street titles. Also, strange things happened to and around me whist working at the bee's.

"Or what? you'll release the dogs, or the bees, or the dogs with bees in their mouths and when they bark they shoot bees at you? Go ahead!

Computer labs jobs can be great, but the situation can be much different if it's the computer lab for a professional school, such as a business or law school. I had thought that I could meet a nice sugar mama studying at a top 5 business school. I even watched a few episodes of The Apprentice to convince myself that I could handle living with that level of evil, if she was at work most of the day. Turns out that they all had rings already, but the evil was certainly still there.

Which restaurants did you work at? Do you remember my '98 Corolla?

Also, since you're a Chicagoan, are you coming to the next S&T?

During college I helped run a Boys and Girls club. It was a very rewarding experience being able to effect and improve on the lives of at-risk youth.

Survival in college for me was via two avenues. I worked on the college papers, and I delivered pizza. LOTS of pizza.

Pizza delivery was decent money in the mid-nineties, but I have to assume gas prices have pretty much ruined that.