youtoepea

Hi, It's hard to give advice regarding those schools for Industrial Engineering without truly knowing what type of research you are interested in and which professors you are considering working with. I am a PhD student at an Industrial Engineering department (not a school on your list, and -- just to give my advice credibility -- it's a school that is ranked better than all of those schools). I have visited NCSU and UVa before, and I got the impression that UVa was good at 'systems engineering', which involves more coding and programming, while NCSU was good at more traditional IE areas (production, inventory control, etc) and was starting to grow in the health care area (Denton and Ivy are good researchers). Pitt is also a good school, especially if you want to do health care operations research (Andrew Schaefer is widely famous in IE); finally, USC is OK, but doesn't get a lot of attention for its IE program -- the only thing that I know about USC is that they have the textbook-writing fiend Sheldon Ross. I'd say all 4 schools are on equal footing, as far as reputation goes. I'd be better able to evaluate if you mentioned what type of research you want to work on, but you can't go wrong no matter what school you choose. Further, all 4 schools are in a nice location, although Pitt is most definitely the worst of the 4 (but Pittsburgh can be fun, nonetheless). Hope that helps!