Another "why is Industrial Engineering a joke among engineers" thread

College Majors Engineering Majors
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Hi everyone, this is my first post on college confidential

I’m a senior in an undergraduate Industrial Engineering program. I came to a recent unsettling revelation that i’m not terribly fond of the field and would have probably enjoyed Electrical or Computer Engineering more. That’s a little beside the point though.

I get there’s a pretty common perception that IE is considered a joke and that you don’t even need an IE degree to do an IE job. Most of the other engineers I know don’t seem to know much about it and just assume that after those first 2 years i’ve taken nothing but supply chain, finance and marketing classes. The reality is i’ve had to work extremely hard to keep my grades up in my major classes and seem to spend about as much time as the rest of them doing homework or studying (the term project for my product design class in particular was arguably the hardest thing i’ve ever done). I can’t help but feel a bit dead inside when my effort gets belittled to my major being easy.

Is IE truly THAT much easier than other engineering fields? I’ll concede that my Engineering Economy class probably wasn’t as hard as Fluid Mechanics but I’ve taken a Thermodynamics class and it was by far easier than any IE class i’ve taken. I’d just like to know if the only reason i’ve had success in college is because i’m an Industrial Engineer as opposed to some other engineer.

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Where to begin…

First, an IE program is fairly rigorous program, but you already know that. One way it’s reflected is in the average salary paid to IE’s, which are in line with most other engineers.

Funny, all of those job requisition for IE’s I’ve seen require an IE degree. :slight_smile:

IE’s tend to be very flexible and move throughout an organization (even more so than other engineers). After you’ve been working for several years, you next job may not require an IE degree, but that IE degree will go a long ways to helping you get that job.

I think this is the real problem. Have you talked much with other working IEs? If not, you really need to reach out (via clubs, IE organizations, etc.) and talk with several. I think that will help you decide if you want to stick with IE or move to something else. IE is a very flexible program, you may find that working in a plant is not for you, but working in health care or transportation is a better fit.

It’s also very common for IE’s to earn a minor in computer science, you may want to pursue that option if it’s available.

Good Luck!

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Those industrial engineers are laughing all the way to the bank. Especially when they end up running the companies that employ all those other engineers.

IE’s have a mix of engineering and business skills making them quite versatile. You say you’re “not terribly fond of the field”. What field? IE has myriad applications across almost every industry. Maybe you just haven’t experienced the right path for you.

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I’ll be the first to admit that I am no expert on IE, but for jobs that don’t require IE, don’t be too quick on that. What you are probably seeing are jobs that are posted as “IE, EE, ME” degree needed. I had a job like that for many years designing and maintaining a factory and we had all types. Although in my case the IE’s I personally worked with were idiots.

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Lots of people get to the major classes in junior and senior year and discover they are not in love, be it with ChE or IE. What you may have going for you is that IE probably has a lot of technical electives which you can populate with some CS or EE classes. The business classes will be helpful in any career, even technical ones require that you track costs and project schedules and write and all those good things.

You should be talking to a lot of people this year and looking at a lot of different employers. It is possible you can get your dream job with the IE, as someone mentioned above, it is often posted as IE,EE,ME anyway. You can take some more classes employer paid for your masters degree in whatever you want.

You will be out of that school and away from those people very soon, so give that little to no thought. If you want to be more technical, again take masters degree classes (very technical, math-intense, etc). If you just want to be employable, you are, maybe more so than many tech-focused people.

If you meet your dream employer and find your dream job (which I think is a pipe dream, but could happen for some) and find you are not qualified, that will give you a good direction to follow.

But really, the working world is very different from college and you will like it more or less than you expect and will likely be doing work that you don’t have on any of your lists of possible tasks. Often times, things work out and you either get lucky with that first or second or third job, or at least find a path that leads you to something you like (and that is what you need to do, through your whole career).

Get off CC and go talk to working engineers, professors, grad students, employers, read tech papers, etc.

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Why? It’s flexible and some people are threatened by flexibility… Some people want to have all the answers from the beginning. Some people don’t want to bother with finding out more about it. Industrial and Systems is a good degree to have these days and is competitive salary wise with other engineering degrees . You have to have the initial calculus and science courses that any engineer has to have. You have old school types that graduated decades ago that have not kept up with trends- Industrial and Systems is more popular these days at some schools because the degree is more “versatile.” And then you have the types that think whatever they studied is superior and everybody else they work with are “idiots.”

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^^^ Then you have the types with no actual experience in IE who think they know what’s going on in the field.

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Care to elaborate, simba?

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It may be because other schools have IE (or similar) kind of degree not as robust as your program. At my school there was an Industrial Distribution program 30 years ago, which I think is now called Supply Chain Management. My ID roommates took many of the core STEM courses, but they had a lot of business-ish classes too. For some peopel that would be easy, for others harder.

Try not to sweat it. You are a senior. Now’s the time for job hunting, not regrets.

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sevmom was suggesting that engineers and scientists stop learning when they leave school, which as any engineer or scientist knows, is ridiculous. It’s obvious to me that she’s guessing at what industrial engineers do.

After going through several pages of her past comments, it looks like sevmom has a kid who’s in an IE degree program. I’ve seen nothing that indicates she personally has any kind of scientific or engineering degree or work experience. I know my parents don’t have a deep understanding about my degrees and field of work. Likewise, I don’t presume to be an expert in the fields my kids have degrees in.

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Anyone can do Fast Fourier Thingies and Laplace Whatevers, but it takes an IE to solve the Pallet Stacking Problem :slight_smile:

http://www.golems.org/papers/SchusterIROS10-palletizing.pdf

(yea, we actually write papers about stacking boxes on pallets)

To understand how important IE is… My workplace used to have manufacturing as well as engineering. Then manufacturing was offshored. But before they did, we had a smorgasbord of BAD plant layout, BAD material handling systems, BAD work cell design, BAD job design, and so on. Why? not many IE’s in power. No matter what IE class me or my wife (both IE’s) were thinking of, one could find a plethora of BAD examples right at our fingertips. Needless to say, when our plant was moved offshore, they paid more attention to IE and got it right…

There are all kinds of IE specializations, and some are more entertaining than others. I’m not going to argue it’s as hard as ChemE or EE, but it’s just as needed.

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Wow, sorry, that is crazy if you think I have ever said that “engineers and scientists stop learning when they leave school.” I have also never said I was any kind of expert in engineering. That is insulting.

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I’d say it gets disrespected for two reasons. First, the more “traditional” engineering disciplines design products while industrial engineers design/optimize the processes for making those products, which doesn’t smell like traditional engineering to some. This likely causes some people to look down on IE for what amounts to no good reason.

The other reason I think it might get some disrespect is that a lot of people simply don’t know what industrial engineers do and can’t be bothered to learn about it. It’s easier to just assume inferiority.

Now, could someone with actual IE experience tell me why people often say IE is engineering mixed with business? That’s not the impression I’ve got. I feel like that’s giving an awful lot of credit for technical subject to business majors.

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My graduate IE degree had some business-related classes in it. We had to take a finance class, a management class, and our statistics classes were geared towards business applications.

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My more current IE and Systems sons are both making the big bucks (that’s a joke although they both make very good money, stock options, startup money,etc.).

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Hey Guys, Thanks for the replies!

I did an internship this past summer with a service industry and did get some good working experience, but I felt pretty unfulfilled by it and that was what really made me question my major. It really just felt like the work I did was pretty soft and non technical. I’ve tried looking into the more manufacturing-oriented jobs since from what I can tell, it’ll give me a chance to be closer to engineering products and do something a little grittier.

I’ve talked to some working engineers, including an IE that I worked with during that internship and my dad who has a PhD in chemical engineering. They’ve told me most things you learn about your job are through just working in the real world. I’m not really under the illusion that my degree will totally dictate my career, moreso i’m worried that employers won’t value my IE degree as much another engineering major since it’s considered softer by some. I don’t want my degree to mask what I’m capable of.

To clarify, i’m in Penn State’s program, which has a healthy dose of the manufacturing stuff mandated. I find that the manufacturing content along with the applied statistics and operations research would objectively be considered hard in anyone’s eyes. Even with the human factors and econometric stuff everything always gets turned into an analytical math problem. They definitely treat it like an engineering degree. My computer engineer friend seemed stunned when I knew what a Markov Chain and Dynamic Programming was.

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I had a long response to this typed out… but it doesn’t matter. Do good work, collect a good salary, enjoy your life. If people are giving you crap about what you do or plan to do despite a lack of understanding of what you are even doing or what it takes to do it, don’t talk to those people. I’ve known IE’s who were brilliant and aeros who were idiots, and vice versa, and it is better to think about the person more than what’s on a piece of paper.

And if you still feel down, remember this: IE’s do get picked on more by other engineers, but they still get defended by those same engineers against those outside engineering. Yeah, maybe you do have more business classes than we do, you’re still better than those so-and-so’s in purchasing.

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Cosmicfish - so true. IEs get treated like the kid brother. We pick on them, but by golly no one outside the engineering family is allowed to.

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@simba9 if I may ask which school did you get your Master’s from? Just wondering since you said you had some classes with some business-ish nature. For comparison, Penn State seems to go pretty light on the business stuff for the most part. I haven’t taken any class that was listed in the business college and the IE classes are mostly contextualized with Manufacturing and production.

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This is not the place to fight out personal feuds. One more post by either of you towards the other and you will find yourself suspended from the site. Obviously I have deleted all the off topic posts so this note will make little sense to a new reader here.