Any Georgia Tech Industrial Engineering students?

<p>Hi,</p>

<p>If your studying Industrial Engineering at Georgia Tech share your experience here. </p>

<p>Do you like it? Is it interesting? </p>

<p>Is it hard or easy? Is it hard or easy compared to other majors at Tech? </p>

<p>What do you think about EE or ME? Would those be better? </p>

<p>What are the job prospects after graduating IE at Tech? If anyone has already graduated, Where are you working now? How is the pay?</p>

<p>Are you planning on going to graduate school? (MBA, M.Eng, etc..) </p>

<p>I'm planning on transferring to Tech from Georgia State after this semester. So any info and insight would be greatly appreciated.</p>

<p>Thanks!!</p>

<p>IE at Tech is a great program. If you think that solving business/manufacturing/humanitarian logistics/health care problems using data and applied math is interesting then you will find the program interesting.</p>

<p>Whether it is hard or easy will depend on what you are comparing it to and your background. I would say that it is less time-intensive than other engineering majors at Tech (no labs, no crazy memorization, not a ton of programming, etc) but the mathematical concepts behind statistics, optimization and other tools are challenging.</p>

<p>The job prospects for IEs (and most Tech students) are very good. I graduated last May and am in grad school now and off the top of my head I can’t think of any IE friends that are unemployed. Most have very good jobs at top consulting firms, major national companies (Home Depot, Delta, etc), in finance/banks, and many, many other types of companies that value data analysis and problem solving skills.</p>

<p>What are the types of jobs you can get with an Industrial Engineering degree? Are there only jobs where you spend most of your time in a factory or manufacturing plant or are there other really good options?</p>

<p>What do you think about working for 2-4 years with an IE degree and then going to business school?</p>

<p>Since Georgia Tech is more difficult academically, would it limit your graduate school or MBA options?</p>

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<p>Very few jobs involve sitting in a plant or factory. Most Tech IE’s go either into consulting, or professional positions within a company. Typically, students focus on project management, supply chain management, or healthcare management. The advanced students (MS IE and PhD IE) tend to go into more quantitative fields like programming and software development.</p>

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<p>A lot of people do it.</p>

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<p>It’s actually the opposite. Getting into a good grad school is a combination of your grades and the school at which you earned those grades (otherwise, everyone would simply go to Valdosta State, earn a 4.0, then apply to Harvard). A 3.5 from Tech is as good as a 4.0 from UGA. A 3.5 GPA from UGA in Econ won’t get you into first tier business schools, but a 3.2 GPA from GT will. A 3.0 GPA from UGA in Econ will land you unemployed. Any GPA from GT in IE will land you a job somewhere.</p>

<p>What are the specific jobs you could get with an IE degree from Tech? Some Examples?</p>

<p>Industrial engineers are all about optimization. They optimize product designs, manufacturing processes, systems involving people and money, really anything. The nature of the work can be very quantitative in nature, and is a great blend of statistics and engineering. IE’s have recently become very popular in the finance industry as they are valued for their analytical engineering minds. IE majors also tend to be successful as independent consultants because of the nature of their work. They are often brought in at the end of a project to optimize something. Some say that IE’s are more likely to move into management after a few years because their works puts them in more of a management capacity to begin with, but I don’t necessarily agree with that theory as a general rule.</p>

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Don’t fall into that trap. This is why people hate Tech students. Hard work, regardless of what your diploma says, is the secret to success. As a side note, in many fields, a degree from UGA is also more highly regarded than the same degree from Tech.</p>

<p>Thanks for the response!</p>

<p>I would really appreciate if other current or graduated IE students would share their experiences.</p>

<p>I have some more questions:</p>

<p>If my primary goal/interest isn’t manufacturing, would it still be worth doing Industrial Engineering considering that there are many other options than manufacturing with IE.</p>

<p>Eventually, my goal is to go into the business world or finance and be in management positions. So would it be better to do Industrial Engineering + MBA or Economics/Business + MBA?</p>

<p>Quote:
“Most have very good jobs at top consulting firms, major national companies (Home Depot, Delta, etc), in finance/banks, and many, many other types of companies that value data analysis and problem solving skills.”</p>

<p>What kind of specific jobs are GT IE graduate doing in consulting, major national companies, and finance/banks.</p>

<p>Quote:
“Most Tech IE’s go either into consulting, or professional positions within a company.”</p>

<p>What are these professional positions?</p>

<p>An industrial engineer hired by a manufacturing firm will go into some sort of optimization, usually. There’s no generic answer for what IE’s do other than that, so here are some examples:</p>

<p>For example, you might be hired by an airline to look at how to price a flight in order to maximize revenue. Should you have 20 first class seats or 10? Should you put deeply discounted seats on Priceline to increase sales, and if so, how discounted? Should you use a different size plane?</p>

<p>As another example, you might work for a manufacturing firm benchmarking a manufacturing process. How long should it take to assemble a computer? Where are the bottlenecks? Should you add a second line for a particular process?</p>

<p>As another example, you might work in transportation and logistics optimization. Should we fly the parts from China or should we ship it? If we use trucks, what route should the truck take? Should we relocate our plant to China and just ship finished goods rather than raw materials?</p>

<p>Yet another example is working for the Red Cross. Given that the Red Cross has a large amount of resources to deal with disaster relief, and no one knows where the next disaster will be located, how should the Red Cross store their goods? Should they have one central warehouse with planes that can get resources to an area fast? Should they have some regional warehouses spread throughout the world? And if so, where?</p>

<p>Another example is working at a hospital. Patients come in and are treated, but should they be treated first come, first served? Most critical to least critical? Most doctor time to least doctor time? Given that a doctor costs twice as much as a nurse, should you have more nurses and less doctors or more doctors and less nurses? How many OR’s should you have? Non-critical patient beds? ICU beds?</p>

<p>You could also work in warehousing. Given that you have a large warehouse, what’s the optimal way to store material inside of the warehouse to decrease the amount of time it takes a worker to pick items for shipment? How many out-bound shipment doors? How many in-bound? Should you use a few large trucks for delivery or several smaller ones? </p>

<p>Then there’s consulting. A private equity firm wants to buy this small company. Should they do it? Is the small company’s operation setup properly and is there anything quick that the PE firm can do to raise revenue quickly?</p>

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<p>If you want to go into business (and I mean high 6-figure / 7-figure salary type of business), you need to work backwards:</p>

<ul>
<li><p>You need to go to a top MBA program. Lower tier MBA programs are worthless. You need a Wharton, Harvard, Stanford, MIT-Sloan, etc. on your resume.</p></li>
<li><p>How do you get into those top programs? Hint: it’s not your grades. A 4.0 GPA with a 700+ GMAT doesn’t guarantee you admission. Instead, what you need is the right work experience. What’s the “right” work experience? You need to work for a company that traditionally places into those MBA programs (has connections) and that can introduce you to people that make important decisions: C-level managers at Fortune 500 companies. When the Chief Operating Officer of GE writes you a letter of recommendation to Harvard, you’re in.</p></li>
<li><p>How do I get the “right” experience? Work for one of the big consulting, banking, or private venture companies. If Bain or McKinsey hire you as an undergraduate, their entire goal is to get you into Harvard then rehire you at graduation (clients won’t pay them much for a Georgia Tech BS, but will pay them a ton for a Harvard MBA). To get you into those schools they will put you in high profile positions where you can meet important people. Walmart is considering purchasing Target? Guess what - you’re the guy standing in front of Walmart’s CEO talking about the operational benefits that Walmart can bring to Target. When the acquisition happens and is a success, you now have on your resume that you assisted in a $40 billion merger and Mike Duke (the CEO of Walmart and GT IE graduate) puts in a personal call to get you a full scholarship and admission to Harvard Business.</p></li>
<li><p>How do I get a job with one of those big companies? You go to a school that those companies target. Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech, UNC, UVA, Duke, etc. Those companies target top schools only and target the top students in those schools (3.5+ GPA’s, good leadership and work experience). Is going to UGA and earning a 4.0 going to help you? No. Because the companies that can get you to the next level do not recruit at UGA. If it was purely a GPA game, everyone would go to West Georgia and graduate with a 4.0. Is going to GT and earning a 2.8 going to help you? No. You’ve knocked yourself out of contention for a top job. So if you want to play this game, you need to go to a top school and earn a top GPA.</p></li>
</ul>

<p>There are obviously other ways to get into top programs - some people luck in (they get hired into a typical office position and make friends with some powerful people), some people find alternate routes (start up the next Facebook and make billions and you can go to any college you want - although the appeal of an MBA at that point probably isn’t that great), some people work their way in through a professor (find a professor at a top program, show interest in his research, provide him with some data from your company, and sometimes you can use his support to leverage admission). But the above is the best “recipe” for success.</p>

<p>Thank you so much! That was really helpful. I think I’m pretty convinced to do IE at tech looking all these benefits. If I do IE at tech I can choose the Economic Design Analysis track and I can choose a lot of electives in econ. That way I can do IE with a strong foundation in Economics. What do you think about that?</p>

<p>What do you think about doing IE and going into Finance/Banking?</p>

<p>I also have another question. After a ton of research I’ve noticed that I can do MANY of the jobs with an IE degree that I could do with Economics BBA. Is that true?</p>

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<p>It sounds like a good idea. The only problem is that EDA isn’t the most in demand concentration if you don’t get into Banking or Consulting. There are not that many EDA positions (compared to other IE concentrations) and there are tens of thousands of Econ graduates per year (vs. just hundreds of IE grads) competing for those positions. But if it’s what you love, go for it. Just keep an open mind for the first few years for other career option (particularly if your GPA isn’t 3.5+ which would get you an interview at a consulting firm or bank). </p>

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<p>If you plan your career as I mentioned above, it’s a very good option. However if your goal is to go directly from undergrad to Goldman Sachs, you need to look at Wharton for undergrad. From GT (and basically anywhere not named Wharton) you will need an MBA. </p>

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<p>If you go through a strictly EDA path it is. However an IE degree is more flexible. Most IE’s work in Supply Chain, Logistics, OR, or Simulation positions. An Econ degree will not let you go into those fields.</p>

<p>If my primary goal, as of now, isn’t to go into manufacturing, should I still do IE?</p>

<p>Can I still go into finance/banking if I don’t do EDA and do a different concentration?</p>

<p>As was said before, almost no one goes into manufacturing. Some people work for manufacturing companies, but that’s not the same as going into manufacturing. </p>

<p>Yes, you can go into finance/banking with any IE concentration. All they care about is that you have a high GPA and that you’ve taken some finance classes.</p>

<p>bump…</p>

<p>Hi guys. This was a very useful post. Just 1 doubt: do international students have equal opportunities to find a job after graduating, as US students do? & specifically at Georgia Tech?</p>

<p>& by the way, i love math. Will this course suit me?</p>

<p>Is there any difference between industrial engineering and financial engineering or operations research?</p>

<p>International students do not have the same opportunities, and that are is true regardless of school. International students require sponsorship, which is expensive and not always available. As a little result, some (probably more than half) will not interview you if you are an international student.</p>

<p>Alright. i have a job back here in my country, but believe that IE @ GaTech was a better option. Why is it that international students dont have those opportunities? Is it because of the recession, or is it always so?</p>

<p>It is always that way. It costs a US employer $50,000 to $100,000 to sponsor an international employee. Unless you possess a skill that no US worker demonstrates, you’re at a major disadvantage. The more advanced your degree (MS, PhD, etc) the more likely you are to be hired.</p>