@birdisaword - USC (the one in Los Angeles.) I got it in the late 1989.
This is the first time I have heard anyone say that a Thermodynamics was easy.
Thermodynamics is a piece of cake. I’m a non engineer, non scientist though so take anything I say here with a grain of salt.
Sevmom - funny.
Thermodynamics and the like are hard classes but there’s plenty of materials to study from, worked problems, etc. There were some problems in IE (like the infamous Pallet Stacking Problem) that you need to learn how to do by hand and it’s like doing 3-dimensional long division. Not necessarily difficult like Fast Fourier difficult but more of a puzzle. In human factors, you get into task analysis and all of a sudden you need a 25 page paper.
Thermodynamics is objectively not that hard. It just seems hard because it is often the first exposure a student has to an engineering course and way of thinking. Further, because it is an early class, it is often inexperienced professors or those that draw the short straw and don’t really wish to be teaching it that end up teaching the class, meaning there seems to be a disproportionally large percentage of poor teachers handling the subject. I’d guess most engineers who took it would find it quite easy if they took it senior year instead of sophomore year.
I do think it is funny/sad that there has been some sentiment here that a non engineer or non scientist should not have any right to post on an engineering forum. I have an engineer husband (and his dad), engineer sons. I come at things from a mom perspective. I have looked at the issues, looked into all the current IE and Systems things. Looked at other engineering disciplines. Advised in terms of fit. I am sorry that is not okay.
As long as you make it clear you don’t have an engineering background, sure, go ahead and post your comments.
I have never represented anywhere that I had an "engineering background. "
Given your rather insistent explanations of what’s involved in engineering, you certainly did.
I will back off from any response here as I have been advised you are trying to “feud” with me. PM me if you want to continue a discussion. Thanks.
Thank you. I’ll back off, too.
@birdisdaword - you’re a senior, my $0.02 says to finish this up, get a job, and get your employer to pay for some cs work, whether it’s a certificate, general course work, or toward an advanced degree.
I’ve had the job title of “Systems Engineer” for most of the last 25 years (and software engineer or architect for the remainder), It’s been heavily in embedded control systems and I work with a lot of people who studied software, electrical, and mechanical engineering. My background is something like applied math with some graduate work in CS and IE - and I respect the discipline of IE. Don’t think I’d want to be one, but I love the study of it, if that makes any sense.
I’ll posit that thinking about problems as time-motion related, job scheduling, and general mathematical flows can really work for you if you decide to pursue software sometime later, and likewise, being able to roll your own data reduction, simulation, and reliability models really ought to add power to your abilities as an IE. In other words, these disciplines can work really well together.
If someone near you is calling it “Imaginary Engineer” the joke really is on them. FWIW, the pure math majors used to feel similarly about the applied math majors who used to feel that way about the physicists and other grease-under-the-fingernails students of science. In fact, it’s all difficult; it’s all necessary; it’s all good.
FWIW, I refer to IE texts more than I do my CS books. Math, physics, and engineering concepts stick around longer than any specific technology, IMO.
[edit: got rid of some quotation marks, added the last sentence]
I work in the embedded world (consumer electronics) where there are lines in the sand between software and systems engineers. At least where I work systems people are mostly EE’s and deal with finicky hardware and even more finicky customers. However, the systems people generally do the choice work (trips to customer site, demos, requirements, more requirements, test plans, etc etc. They also are rumored to have secret stashes of connectors and other hardware for us software/user interface type people. They are also the best resources for good restaurant recommendations near the customer locations 
They occasionally show up during integration and are generally pretty good at troubleshooting hardware issues, except they usually manage to escape such tasks.
A few of my systems friends have jumped ship to defense work and there systems engineering is a lot more disciplined and far more critical in terms of integration.