<p>I am undecided right now. Currently attending community college and wish to transfer to a 4 year institution. The college lists two programs: </p>
<ol>
<li>Industrial and Systems Engineering </li>
<li>Mechanical Engineering</li>
</ol>
<p>What is the difference between these two? Which degree, if obtained, opens more opportunities for me?</p>
<p>Not a bad idea to read up on the Wiki page. I’ll leave that to you to get an idea about the differences between the majors. They’re not at all similar. </p>
<p>As for opportunities, as of right now, they have approximately equal employment prospects and about equal starting pay. So read the wiki pages and go with whichever sounds more interesting to you.</p>
<p>I would assume ME would have more opportunities. After all, MEs practically work on everything.</p>
<p>Systems engineers work on just about everything, just like mechanical engineers. Your opportunities would be similar.</p>
<p>Also, pay attention. Industrial and systems engineering are two different disciplines.</p>
<p>To build on boneh3ad -
Be careful with the term system engineering when doing your research on engineering fields. It is often used as a title. In my office, we have “system engineers” that design systems of pumps/valves/heat exchangers/etc. We also have “system engineers” who are the primary architects for designing electronic controls. Both of these positions require either a mechanical or electrical engineering degree. Neither job would fall under the general discipline of system engineering.</p>
<p>Well I mean, typically when you study systems engineering it is more about optimizing systems statistically rather than designing individual components. That is why it is often lumped in with industrial engineering.</p>
<p>Absolutely. </p>
<p>My whole point was that if you are finding job titles with descriptions, be very careful when using them as input when selecting a field of study. Many titles are innocuous in this regard such as “design engineer” or “integration engineer”, but “system engineer” can be misunderstood/misinterpreted.</p>
<p>There are a ton of systems engineers in defense and Intel. The main job is to oversee and guide a product or solution from its idea phase until being fully implemented into the production environment. Systems engineers also make sure that industry standards are being enforced throughout the life-cycle of the product…hence, whey you hear the term “systems engineering life-cycle”, which consists of:</p>
<ol>
<li>Needs Assessments/Concept of Operations (CONOP)</li>
<li>Requirements Analysis</li>
<li>Design</li>
<li>Development</li>
<li>Testing, Verification & Validation</li>
<li>Implementation/Deployment</li>
<li>Sustainment</li>
</ol>
<p>Software engineering is basically a spin-off of the systems engineering process and software development follows pretty much the same steps.</p>