Why Study Industrial Engineering (IEMS) at Northwestern (or anywhere else)
In my role, I talk to students who are considering switching to the Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences (IEMS) major. I also wish more incoming Northwestern students knew about IEMS.
This post is meant to put my material into one place.
All these links apply to students at other schools, too. Some of this material is from other schools. So, feel free to share it with your students.
What is Industrial Engineering at a high level, what else is it called, and how does it compare to other engineering fields (my words)
If I have to be quick, I describe IE as “using math and data to solve business or organizational problems.” If I get more words, I say, “We build math models of systems and help make the systems better.”
Besides, IE, you’ll hear it called Operations Research (OR) or maybe lumped in with Systems Engineering. If you study IE, you can say you are a data scientist. Jeffrey Camm, a professor at Wake Forest, and I argue that you can also call yourself a decision scientist. The professional associations would be INFORMS or the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE).
The other engineering disciplines are more hands-on with actual physical things. However, they use math and data too. And IEs work with them. So the Venn diagrams overlap.
The other engineering fields occasionally joke that IE stands for Imaginary Engineering. One of the student videos (see below) had a great response: “In a sense, they are right. As IEs, we are trained and empowered to use our imaginations to make great change…” This response fits my experience. I felt like I had to be creative to develop good mathematical models to help improve a system or supply chain.
Some Videos Explaining IE (including a playlist with short student videos explaining IE)
Below is the NU IE department’s 2.5-minute video we created in October 2021, which shows how we innovate in the science of data-driven decision-making in complex and uncertain environments through algorithms, computation, and mathematical modeling.
Be sure to check out the types of projects we do in the undergraduate Client Project Challenge class. (This is our capstone class that we run in Junior year, so you can get more real-world experience before entering the job market.)
The University of Michigan’s Industrial and Operations Engineering department created a longer (~16-minute) video explaining how IE’s work with systems and people to solve problems.
If you want to hear from students, here is a playlist of ten short videos from an IISE contest “[showcasing] a wide variety of interesting/impactful/fun applications of Industrial and Systems Engineering.”
Be sure to see this one from an NU student’s experience at a local animal shelter.
What jobs are available after you graduate?
Be sure to watch the student videos referenced above. They highlight many different jobs IE do.
At Northwestern, my informal analysis of the jobs students get falls into three areas:
Management consulting. All the major firms and many smaller ones need the problem-solving skills that IEMS students are ready for.
Finance. Since our students can work with data and math models, the finance industry recruits IEMS students.
Everything else: software, manufacturing, energy, retail, supply chain, and many other industries. The videos above highlight the range of careers available to IEs.
Northwestern doesn’t have an undergraduate business degree. For students interested in going this route, we created a “Roads to Business at Northwestern” website that includes IEMS.
It should be pointed out that the “MS” part of IEMS includes many additional practical skills such as leadership, negotiation, and project management.
The following quote from the CEO of Melissa & Doug shows the value of an IE degree to running a business.
What about jobs in the non-profit or public sector?
IEs go into many areas, including non-profits and the public sector.
Here is a long video about people in IE solving problems for the UN Food Distribution.
This podcast is from an IE who does work in the non-profit/policy area. One of his stories is about helping the Netherlands government determine how tall the dikes should be. He runs a group called Analytics for a Better World.
Great article Mike:
It’s very interesting how the Industrial Engineering field has changed over the years. Back in the 80’s when I studied it was mostly circumscribed to improve systems within the 4 walls of a factory.
I loved University of Michigan emphasis on IE focusing on improving systems whatever those systems are leveraging both math and people skills (what they call empathy).
Personally, it was until I left college and started to work that I realize systems are not only manufacturing ones but any, both for profit and non-profit.