Industrial Engineering

Industrial engineering differs from other branches of engineering in essentially two ways. First, it applies to all types of industrial, commercial, and government activities. Second, it is the only branch of engineering that is explicitly concerned with people as well as things. Industrial engineers are prime sources of management talent. They learn to make decisions concerning the best use of people, material, equipment, and energy in achieving an organization’s aims. To accomplish best use of resources, the industrial engineer systematically collects, analyzes, and arranges factual information in such a way as to fulfill management’s needs. The program’s educational objectives are:

• To actively recruit and retain qualified students and to prepare those students for entry into successful employment as industrial engineers in industry, service, consulting, and/or government organizations or for advanced study at leading graduate schools in engineering, business, management, or other technical or non-technical fields.
• To educate students in a broad range of areas related to effective and established engineering practice, including engineering design, physical as well as engineering sciences, mathematics, information technology and analytical problem solving.
• To encourage students to pursue meaningful work experiences through cooperative education and internships and through course practicum/project experiences and to provide students the tools of systems and management engineering, preparing them for the professional and ethical management of people, processes, systems and products in a wide variety of settings.
• To encourage teamwork skills, particularly the ability to work with people from other fields in integrated engineering teams and the leadership skills for maximizing the performance of those teams.
• To offer a curriculum that encourages students to become broadly educated engineers and life-long learners, with an understanding and appreciation of the arts, humanities, and social sciences, an ability to communicate effectively with various audiences and purposes, and a desire to seek out further educational opportunities.
• To expose students to advances in engineering practice and research as preparation for opportunities in graduate education.
• To obtain resources necessary to recruit, develop, and retain faculty, laboratory, teaching and research assistants and other support staff who are committed to the educational mission of the department and to acquire, maintain, and operate facilities and laboratory equipment appropriate to our engineering program.

Industrial engineering is spread across nearly all kinds of manufacturing. Recent data show that employment offers are especially plentiful in automotive, electronic equipment, management consulting, chemicals, and food processing. A growing trend in IE work, especially consulting, is in the services sector of the economy — banking, transportation, distribution services, and government. Service businesses have not shown the same productivity growth in recent years that manufacturing has, so many firms are now seeking to apply lessons learned in manufacturing to non-manufacturing enterprises.
Job opportunities are in fact so good for NC State IE graduates that IE has remained first among traditional engineering graduates in job placement over the past four years.
Studies in Industrial Engineering include fundamentals of basic and applied sciences, statistics, and mathematics. To learn about interactions of engineering decisions with society’s needs, students take courses in economics, business, humanities, and social sciences. More specialized studies include courses in human performance, manufacturing processes, operation control, information processing, decision analysis, mathematical modeling, and management systems.

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