support as a career

I remember the time when i came to oracle for my job interview. Though I had a offer on hand from another company (via campus placement at bits pilani), but I had not received my joining date yet making me quite nervous. I went through multiple rounds in oracle and in the later rounds i was multiple times asked this "are you okay with support profile". i kept saying 'yes' and got the job offer. that was six years back.
In any college when reading about computers or related technology, anything that we do as practicals is generally writing a program and running it. The program could be relatively simple to complex. But this mapping of IT = programming (aka development) is so ingrained in us then that we don't realize the other roles in the software development lifecycle and are always bent on taking development as a career path.
The first thing that comes to mind when you think of 'support' is call center. You have this image of sitting at a desk with a sheet of paper having the usual set of questions and answers that could be asked by a customer calling you. But tech support is not that, it is much more.
Being in tech support i have realized the complexity in dealing with large IT env where solutions from multiple vendors, technologies, hardware etc must coexist and work with one another. A support engineer needs to understand the environment in its entirety and figure out where the problem lies. The actual problem fix may be done by a developer, but finding the problem area is in many cases is more complex than the fix.
There are 2 ways in which you can increase your knowledge, horizontally and vertically. By horizontally growing you need to be aware of multiple solutions available in various layers of software and hardware stack and have a basic understanding of what works best where. This is generally mapped to a role of a consultant. By vertical growing you know more and more about some specific application. The person grows as 'tech guru' in that space.
So my advise to anyone who is facing the dilema of similar kind is to go ahead give it a shot and you may just like it. There is enough challenging work that can be done in support, testing, QA etc. Don't ignore these roles even if you are from a good college.