Tell me about Industrial Engineering or Systems Engineering and Design...

My son got accepted at UIUC for Industrial Engineering. Within this college they also offer a Systems Engineering and Design Degree (formerly General Engineering). He doesn’t really know much about either of those degrees. He applied for Mechanical Engineering and put IE as a second choice. Honestly, at 17 years old he doesn’t know what he wants to do but really likes all aspects of engineering. He chose these two based on their descriptions in the various schools handouts. It is very difficult to transfer into the Mechanical Engineering program. Any help would be great!

Industrial Engineering is generally seen as a “softer” engineering discipline. It’s very broad and you can chose to focus in specific areas to increase your marketability in the field.

General areas are: Manufacturing, Operations, Supply Chain/Logistics, Ergonomics, Statistical Analysis, Quality Engineering, Quantitative Analysis, Work studies, information tech., and more.

We don’t generally work on products, but more on the process, or how the products are designed, manufactured, brought to the market, and sold. There’s a lot of management concepts. Math isn’t too difficult and the important parts are statistics, some calculus, and linear programming. It’s all above increasing efficiency and reducing the costs of industrial projects.

Salary ranges seem to deviate more than other engineering disciplines. Average is generally consistent or ~10% lower. I honestly believe it’s significantly easier than all other engineering branches (Maybe besides Civil…). It’s a pretty cool major that most people generally don’t consider while first entering college. At my school (RPI), it’s almost seen as a “drop-out” major for people who don’t want to bail all the way down to business.

Even with that reputation, there are plenty of jobs, and the salary is competitive with other disciplines.

Some engineers say IE stands for Imaginary Engineering. Some in the field say it means Insane Earnings. As I have heard it described, engineers design things, industrial engineers design better ways to do things. It’s the “business-y” side of engineering. Salaries are all over the map, because the career can go down any path. As specialists of efficiency and productivity (which lead to profitability), IE’s are hired to literally every industry. With their skill set, they often rise to the highest levels of management. For instance, the largest IE program by far is at Georgia Tech. Of all their IE graduates, 1 in 10 have reached the highest level in their organization–CEO, CFO, Governor, Admiral, etc.

IE will have a greater emphasis on math and statistics based topics versus physics based topics in many other kinds of engineering.

As others have said, it is more about designing processes than things. Someone who frequently thinks about things like finding the optimal way to get somewhere, move objects around when they are or have to be stacked or put behind each other, minimize time wasted when doing multiple tasks, etc. may have the mindset of solving IE problems.

Occasionally you’ll see an IE undergrad or graduate program with an operations research emphasis. It’s a different kind of difficult than other disciplines. I don’t know that it’s less.