In simple terms, Ting says, industrial engineering has a lot to do with efficiency. It focuses on working with a system, improving it, and implementing it. The system can be mechanical, but it can also be a system of people. Industrial engineers focus on anything that is multilayered and are vital across fields, meaning students have a variety of options when looking for ISE co-op positions.
“Industrial engineering is very broad, so pretty much anything can be an industrial engineering co-op,” Ting said.
For her first two co-ops, she worked in the construction industry at The Whiting-Turner Contracting Company. There, she served as a project manager and got experience both in project engineering and field engineering. This was her introduction to what it’s like to work as an industrial engineer in the industry, and she gained valuable insights. It was also her first experience in the construction field and helped her get a better understanding of what she wanted her career to look like postgraduation.
Currently on her third co-op, she is working at Crane ChemPharma & Energy as an inside sales engineer. This position allows her to utilize both her technical engineering knowledge and her passion for business, exactly what she set out to do. For one project, she is working on optimizing a workflow for how orders go through a system.
“It’s an introductory project to get me more well-versed with the system,” she said. “I was told to optimize it and make it better, which is exactly what I do as an ISE student.”
Passionate about industrial engineering, Ting is one of a handful of ISE students who are working together to take their experience and provide suggestions on how to make the program even better for future cohorts and promote it to prospective students. They have formed a ‘Skunkworks’ team, a term coined by Lockheed Martin to describe a small, highly innovative group.