A local member of the young people community has reportedly enrolled into the University of Toronto’s Industrial Engineering program under the sincere belief that the word “industrial” referred to lifestyle choice involving drum machines, synths, heavy distortion, nihilistic lyrics, and goth-adjacent fashion choices.
The confusion began during the university application season, where the future engineering student skimmed program options and saw “Industrial Engineering.” According to friends sitting next to him, the student grinned and said “finally, a degree dedicated to Nine Inch Nails that also gives job security!” before submitting an application with the speed and efficiency of a local band performing for a middle-aged audience on a work day.
On the first day of classes, the student arrived wearing a black hoodie and a backpack plastered with pins and patches of various industrial music artists, including the aforementioned Nine Inch Nails, KMFDM, Rammstein, and Poppy.
The problems for the student began when it became apparent to him that all of his classmates were unfamiliar with the artists he listened to, and completely unaware of industrial music being a real genre of music. When an Industrial Engineering professor welcomed his class in his first lecture, the student was hit with a wave of disappointment.
The professor described industrial engineers as “engineers who improve systems and processes”, which baffled the student, who believed that industrial engineers only worked on sound systems. When the professor described queueing theory, the student reportedly raised his hand and asked “queueing…like lineups at concerts?” and received a response of “yes exactly!” from the professor, which led the student into a false sense of security that was swiftly shattered by the professor following up with, “we study all kinds of queues, especially ones in healthcare and service-based businesses!”
The breaking point came in the second week of classes, where a guest lecturer introduced the concept of human factors to the first-year audience. During the question period, the student asked the professor if this area of study could be used to “make leather pants more comfortable,” resulting in a judgemental stare from the professor and guffaws from other students in the lecture hall. By now, the student had realized he was the odd one out from everyone else in his program; where other students were busy optimizing their Linkedin profiles between classes, he was busy thrifting and rating albums on rateyourmusic.com.
In spite of the confusion and lack of alignment with his interests, the student remains enrolled in Industrial Engineering, citing the sunk cost fallacy, parental expectations, and the faint hope that his beloved genre will be discussed when he takes courses for the music minor later on in his undergrad. Until then, he has vowed to cope with his circumstances by emulating the behaviour of his industrial music legends: sampling the sounds of construction outside Bahen and calling it “sonic immersion.”
