Hello,
I just recently switched from Mechanical Engineering to Industrial Engineering. Why?? Well, lets just say that through my continuing participation in FIRST... I'm still learning about myself and what I'd like to do. When in High School, my thought was that "robots are cool, I'll try Mechanical!" Then over the past year, my involvement took a very unique twist that opened my eyes a lot...
I have a year's worth of Engineering experience: two summer internships at Hamilton Sundstrand and six months at DEKA. The two summers were spent helping the Project Engineers, and the six months were spend doing Quality work as a test technician on the iBOT. Everyone knew I was a ME student, but for some reason (particularly noticable at DEKA), I never really had a natural inclination or curiosity as to what the MEs were doing. Instead, I liked what my managers were doing with their problems of money/time/people. I watched them very closely.
I helped with two FIRST events where I learned how to event coordinate, plan, and manage large projects. I loved doing it. I loved taking those kinds of ideas & problems... and turning them into a reality. So it hit me! I could get an ME degree and be hired as project or quality anyway (which happens to the people who may not be very competitive at design... like me, nobody knows me in FIRST for robot design because I haven't done any in the past three years), or I could go get that IE degree and be even more competitive in project & quality. My aim is to get an MBA afterwards.
So there it is, my goal is to be a project-manager and it seems that Industrial Engineering (in NU terms that is) is probably the best Business undergrad degree you can get.
Life is starting to make sense
ByE
erin