Anyone majored/working in Operations/Supply Chain Management?

Ghost73
Fri, 21 Jun 2013 17:48:11 +0000

What school do you go to? At my school (smaller regional state school), there are only ~50 SCM majors, but they only started the SCM program about 5 years ago. I am looking to transfer to one of the better SCM schools (Michigan State), and there are a lot more SCM majors there, obviously.

I think you’re right, a lot of people do not major in Supply Chain because it is not as “sexy” as finance/accounting/whatever. It’s also not very well known, generally speaking. Whenever I tell people what my major is, they immediately ask “what’s that?”. The thing is, the 124943942042 Finance majors from state schools are NOT going to be getting those sexy Wall Street finance jobs at all in the first place, even though they think they are. Less competition in SCM.

I’ve been reaching out to a lot of people in the field, and I would not say that it’s a “terrible job” at all. Certainly a lot of headaches, but what job doesn’t? At MSU, SCM majors have the highest average starting salary out of the business school, about 50-55k. It does not seem uncommon for people with great grades and internships to get closer to 60k. In fact, I spoke with an SCM grad who started at 75k at Microsoft right out of school. Obviously he’s an outlier, but it’s not impossible. All of the juniors/seniors at my current school have gotten good jobs and internships as well.

I think part of the reason that a lot of engineers work in SCM is because there really aren’t that many schools that offer the major, and not that many people that major in it in the first place. I imagine companies will want people who can step into SCM roles right away, and having an SCM degree with internships will allow you to do that. If Industrial Engineering was that much better/in demand than SCM, then they would have much higher starting salaries than SCM, but they are nearly identical.

Here are a couple older threads on this topic:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/engineering-majors/991991-industrial-engineering-vs-supply-chain-management.html

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/business-major/1050555-supply-chain-management-vs-industrial-engineering.html

I kind of disagree with saying that SCM is a new field. I think the emphasis it’s been receiving is definitely more recent, but the field itself has been around for a while. In fact, I know that MSU has been teaching SCM since the 60’s.

If you think you’ll like SCM and want to do it, then do it. Just stop caring what other people think.