You know something's meant to be when you run away from it as fast as you can, only to crash full speed into that very something you're avoiding.

Well, that's pretty much what happened to me when I was choosing my major in university. I mean, really, it's a huge decision. It's going to dictate what I do for the rest of my life (technically it will, if I want to be able to use what I learned).

So this is who I ran: when applications for the country's top universities were nearing their deadlines, my mother kept bugging me to pick a major to write on my forms.

"Go for engineering courses," she said.

"There's a lot of money in being an ECE," she quipped.

"Be an Industrial Engineer, all my bosses are industrial engineers," she tempted me with.

But then I kept thinking to myself, am I really going to let my mom dictate what I do for the rest of my life? Isn't this my life? And so I humored my mother by writing Industrial Engineering on my application for my second-choice university, but I placed Applied Physics on my dream school's application form. Well, the name sounds awesome and really hard - instant bragging rights even if I don't get honors. And besides, it's "applied," so there's got to be practical stuff and not just theoretical stuff. And then I passed both universities and ran away to my dream school.

And this is how I crashed: I have never been more wrong in my entire life. Applied Physics was not as "applied" as I hoped it would be. Numbers swam before me and everyone else from competitive high schools didn't even bat an eye because they've learned it already. I had to study, study, study, and I stayed alive and my grades were well. But I wasn't happy.

Which brought me to this question, and you've probably been asking this to yourself too since I mentioned it. What is Industrial Engineering?

Industrial engineering is a branch of engineering which deals with the optimization of complex processes, systems or organizations.

Resources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_engineering

https://www.iienet2.org/details.aspx?id=716