Continuing with our discussion of systems engineering, I would like to quote a small portion of the INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook, Version 2.0, p.11, dated July 2000. This will give you a sense of both the technical nature of systems engineering and the wide variety of skill sets required within the field.

International Council on Systems Engineering
SE Handbook Working Group

“Systems engineering is an overarching discipline, providing the tradeoffs and integration between system elements to achieve the best overall product and/or service. Although there are some important aspects of project management in the Systems Engineering process, it is still much more of an engineering discipline than a management discipline. It is a very quantitative discipline, involving tradeoff, optimization, selection, and integration of the products of many engineering disciplines.”

“In its present (and still evolving) form, Systems Engineering combines elements of many disciplines such as operations research, system modeling and simulation, decision analysis, project management and control, requirements development, software engineering, specialty engineering, industrial engineering, specification writing, risk management, interpersonal relations, liaison engineering, operations analysis, and cost estimation.”

I have a real love for mathematics and, unexpectedly, I discovered that I enjoyed applying math to business problems.  This led to my taking numerous courses in operations research / management science, decision analysis, statistics and probability, mathematical models, and simulation.  Ultimately, this led to a career in systems engineering with IBM.