<p>After school I want to get into some species of data analysis. Which undergraduate degree would give me a more robust quantitative problem-solving toolbelt: Industrial Engineering or Statistics + Operations Research?</p>
<p>Links to programs I'm looking at:</p>
<p>University of Illinois - Chicago / Statistics and Operations Research
UIC</a> Undergraduate Catalog 2011-2013 | Statistics and Operations Research</p>
<p>University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign / Industrial Engineering
<a href="http://ise.illinois.edu/sites/default/files/documents/ie1oddcurr.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://ise.illinois.edu/sites/default/files/documents/ie1oddcurr.pdf</a></p>
<p>Even if the answer is Stats & OR, is there any advantage to the IE curriculum given my career goal?</p>
<p>Thanks for the help!</p>
<p>IE Major here.
Looking at the two, since you know you want to go into data, Chicago seems like it is more suited academically. The only thing that I was wondering about was ‘business statistics’, but all the math is there and more than likely the OR I & II cover the same things as our deterministic and stochastic classes cover. With the IE curriculum you will have to take a lot of the core engineering classes like physics + thermal physics, chem, statics, dynamics, solids, materials. This is a lot of stuff that, while good to the engineer that may dabble in some of these areas, you may not need going into strictly OR. To be honest, they seem to have a lot less IE type classes in that program than most of the others I have checked.</p>
<p>Also:
you may just want to look through both schools career fairs to see if there is a good amount of recruiting for that major. This may make a difference.</p>
<p>Thanks Chuck!</p>
<p>Good call on the recruiting thing, that’s pretty smart. I’ll look into it.</p>