Industrial Engineering

Hello Sydnee-
Industrial Engineers have many options!
I graduated with a bachelors in industrial engineering.
Many people had focused on the manufacturing side of industrial, so improving processes on a manufacturing floor. Many people I graduated with looked for positions with food/beverage companies in positions like production manager, usually in charge of a particular process of production and ensuring that production was up to standards. Another position could be ensuring the quality in the products as an industrial you will go through classes teaching you how to measure quality in a process this can help you land a quality engineer position.

I didn't take a traditional industrial job position, I focused in college on many process improving projects for the healthcare industry which is in great need of process improving!

Now I work for a consulting company as a business analyst, I can go into companies and improve their processes or sometimes i gather requirements and design new computer systems to aid in their day to day business. Industrial is a great major since you are able to focus in many different areas, you are well versed in business and have great technical skills and have good problem solving skills this will help you land many types of positions.

To summarize some job roles that you may be qualified for would be:
production manager
quality engineer
Sales engineer

many business roles or technical roles such as:

business analyst
data quality analyst
technical analyst

I took a mix of Industrial Engineering and Computer Science courses in school. I would highly recommend either one. If you end up in a different engineering field taking IE classes will be helpful no matter what.

A lot of the comments above already touched on a lot of the traditional job areas that you can work with in IE.
I'd like to add that many of the skills I learned can also be applied in the Tech Industry. You will learn a lot about lean manufacturing principles, optimization techniques, some management concepts. I even took a class on root cause analysis methodologies and they help me everyday.

For instance during my day to day I work to help guide and improve application performance after it has reached production. A lot of it is looking at code, but so much of that is understanding user flow, business processes, and analyzing data, all things that you learn in IE. If I didn't learn it, I can't fully realize the impact to the users and I feel I wouldn't be as well equipped to do the work that I do. I've also been working with rolling out new monitoring tools and processes and likely would be worse off without at least some background in IE.

Best of luck, I'm sure you can find rewarding classes and work in an IE program.

Industrial Engineers design production systems to get products to the customers as fast, as cheap, and as reliable as possible.

In a classic manufacturing plant, some examples of IEs roles are to increase tooling efficiency, capital planning, new product ramp up strategy, improve key performance indexes, etc.

In a service industry. IE's work to optimize queue (waiting time) at Disneyland, airline pricing strategy, flight routes and scheduling, hospital staffing level, and so on.

Hola Sydnee :)
I am an Industrial Engineer and truly believe it is a GREAT career choice.
Some people think IE is only about production lines, industrial security and manufacturing, even though it does cover those aspects, it also introduces you to management concepts, business administration and organizational behavior.
It is very versatile and has opened many doors for me in the corporate world, I've worked in Sales, Marketing, Business Development & Financial Services.
If you are analytical, enjoy being a change agent and like challenging the status quo in means of process improvement, I would highly recommend going this route. Let me know if you have any questions, will be happy to share more insights.

Greetings from Panama!

Hi Sydnee!

These sites will give you a good insight into industrial engineering
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWZp3ZX-kz4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB_a-nvJL2o
http://www.engineergirl.org/cms/6073.aspx