<p>Industrial engineering is not real engineering in that you don’t design widgets. You usually figure out how to build widgets faster, cheaper, etc. It has broad use in anything, Fast Food, Information Technology, optimizing of business processes, and so on. That’s Mrs. Turbo - graduate Industrial Engineer doing IT / process work for a major international consulting firm. It’s not engineering that tells you what machines to buy and such… but a lot of math, statistics, IT, business process design, and so on. telling you how to best make use of what you have.</p>
<p>Likewise, human factors engineering is more about designing the various gadgets from a user’s point of view (i.e design what the user sees and experiences). I do that for a living and it’s not engineering in the sense that you figure out the electrical or mechanical stuff, more the conceptual stuff. I also get to write lots of software for consumer electronics, again, not ‘engineering’ in the sense that I don’t really worry about the hardware or the interfaces that are there…</p>
<p>All the disciplines listed here involve lots of electives outside engineering, pay well, and are very entertaining to boot.</p>