Industrial Engineering or Operations Research

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

<p>I am debating whether or not I should major in Industrial Engineering or Operations Research. My dream is to get my PhD in Operations Research. I would also like to earn an MBA. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any distance learning schools that offer Operations Research/MBA, but I found a lot of distance learning schools offering MBA/Industrial Engineering degrees. If I enrolled in the dual program @ Purdue in Industrial Engineering/MBA, would this hurt my chances of getting my PhD in Operations Research later on? Also, is the Masters in Industrial Engineering closely related to the Masters in Operations Research? Thanks!</p>

<p>Take care,
~Beckie</p>

2

<p>At some schools, you can construct a MSIE from almost all O.R. courses. Georgia Tech and U-Wisconsin comes to mind in that regard.</p>

3

<p>Is getting a M.S in Applied Math with Operations Research concentration a good idea in terms of job outlook?</p>

4

<p>I have the same question as yg, but at the B.S. level because it seems more like a graduate level major.</p>

5

<p>I like operations research and IE. They both have a solid job outlook, interesting work, and decent pay ranges. However, there are some very new, exciting fields related to high-performance computing and applied mathematics that I really want to pursue myself. They are:</p>

<p>Systems Engineering
Computational Science
Analytics
Optimization
Bioinformatics</p>

<p>…And actually the list could go on for quite a while. Look up computational science on wiki and it will give you a long list of subdisciplines related to. Maybe it’s just me, but I find all this stuff unbelievably interesting.</p>

6

<p>Thanks everyone for your valuable feedback! I’m going to check some of this stuff out. My dream job would be working for DARPA someday doing mathematical modeling or some type of mathematical analysis.</p>

7

<p>At some schools, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research is a single department:
[Academic</a> Programs](<a href=“http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/AcademicPrograms/index.htm]Academic”>http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/AcademicPrograms/index.htm)</p>

8

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<p>Georgia Tech has IE and OR in the same department, but with separate degrees. There’s an MS IE and an MS OR. There’s also a separate PhD IE and PhD OR. </p>

<p>There is only one bachelor’s degree (BS IE) but that degree has five tracks, with one being general IE and one being OR.</p>