As everyone who knows even the slightest bit about me is aware, I am obsessive about school and would like to return ASAP. The magical thing about Tucson is that it’s home to the University of Arizona. The magical thing about the University of Arizona is that it’s not the U of I it’s got a lot of really cool majors and appears to be a very good school overall.

One particularly interesting-sounding major I came across this evening arises from the engineering department: systems engineering. On the U of A engineering department’s website, systems engineering is defined as a field “…concerned with the design, modeling, and analysis of technological systems that employ people and machines, software and hardware, material and energy for such diverse purposes as communication, health care, transportation or manufacturing…if complex systems are to do what is intended, without unwanted side effects, they must be designed not only with imagination and technical skill, but with rigorous attention to the design process itself and to the interactions among the system components and with other systems and society.”
And, “…the curriculum provides students with design viewpoints and methodologies that emphasize system integration, and with subject matter and tools for modeling and analysis especially appropriate for large complex systems, e.g., probability and statistics, system theory, decision analysis, and simulation.”

So…it’s basically like statistics with an engineering bend, or so that’s what I gather.

HOW COOL?

Also, they explicitly list Raytheon as one of the major employers of system engineers, and Raytheon has a special polar exploration sector that I’d totally love to worm my way into someday. Antarctica, I’m coming for you soon, I swear.

I must conduct further research on this field…