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
