I believe that the impact of Industrial Engineering is often overlooked. When people think about engineering marvels, they think about a NASA rocket, the Sydney Opera House, the Large Hadron Collider, etc. Rarely do people think about the process of getting the tiles on the Sydney Opera House made, or how they were packaged and shipped? But I think of those things. I chose to visit the places where things I love are made and places where people to sit down to think about how things can occur more quickly and at a lower cost. I learned a little more about how rackets are made. I learned about the process of making luxury leather purses. While I already knew a little about the tunnels running under Disney World, I read about other logistical innovations that help make it the “most magical place on Earth”. Engineering innovations aren’t always news-breaking discoveries; they happen during everyday problem-solving activities. Sometimes, the smallest changes in the supply chain can have the largest ripple effects. And it is not always about making things faster and cheaper. Sometimes it is about figuring out what you “value”. It takes some “thinking outside the box” to figure that out. In a luxury purse, the value is in the hand-made details, the stitching, and the quality of the leather. In IKEA, the innovation are in having clients retrieve the furniture from the built-in warehouse and assemble the furniture themselves. I fell in love with the hidden underdogs of engineering – all the logistics, quality, and manufacturing process innovations that help get those experiences or items we love in a way that makes sense, and that optimizes resources to give us the most “value”.