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Vatican City State1650 Posts
I transferred to the school I'm planning to graduate in about a year ago. I have a year left, and it turns out that it's impossible for me to graduate with highest honors.
The school only calculates my grades for the classes I took in this UC. And by the time I transferred, I was already entering upper division engineering courses, meaning harder classes, so naturally more difficult to maintain a 4.0. That was especially the case for me as I had a two year break before I re-entered college.
I still got a 3.8 out of that, but it's simple math.
The total gpa for honors calculations, in my case, will be over two years. In one year out of that, I got a 3.8. Even if I get a 4.0 the remaining year, it still averages out to slightly less than 3.9. (like 0.004 less)
The highest honors cutoff is 3.9. So I'll be barely under the cutoff.
What pisses me off is that the jokers that came here since frosh all benefited from the easy As of lower division freshmen/sophomore courses and can cruise to the summa cum laude, while me, even after working my ass off, won't get it.
I feel like it's discrimination against transfers, how our As in lower division courses like gen chem and gen phys is not counted in the honors calculation.
Then again, I'm complaining about this in a video gaming forum. I guess the best advice would have been to quit playing so much sc and concentrate on making that 3.8 into 4.0. But it's too late now.
Sigh.
1. Do grad schools care about Summa Cum Laude (highest honors) vs Magna Cum Laude (high honors)?
2. Do med schools care about it?
3. Do employers care about it?
 
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Honestly, if your GPA is 3.8, I'm pretty sure you wont have to worry about anything.
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It's nice to have an a resume, though I wouldn't know;)
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United States2969 Posts
Employers will assume a transfer student should have had the foresight to realize that GPA generally doesn't translate between schools and banish you to a life of toiling physical labor.
Come on yo...
1. Not really
2. Not really
3. Not really
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Stop stressing about this. Your grade point average is great. Sure it's not perfect, but most people would be happy with it. Grad schools don't just look at your grades. They also take into consideration your GRE scores, your letters of recommendation (especially who they're from), and (at least in the humanitites, not sure about engineering) a sample of your work.
I don't know about med schools, but I'd assume it's similar to grad school in that they give equal weighting to other factors. Professional and graduate schools try to get a feel for you as a person, not just as a transcript. So... stop fretting so much.
Employers don't really care about your grades that much. Networking is more important than grades. And besides, your grades are good by any standard... so unless you're applying to NASA or Google (where a perfect 4.0 average is probably a minimum requirement <just guessing>), you can get a job just fine if you know the right people.
On a side note: I don't know you so I could be way off base, but I sense a bit of perfectionism in you. I used to be the same way and still am sometimes. You don't need to be perfect in order to be okay. That's a losing game. No one is perfect, and no one ever will be... so to think that you're only okay if you're perfect is always a losing game.
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relax, schools will look at a 3.899999 the exact same as a 3.9
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Oh no man im sure you will have an incredibly difficult time with that GPA!!
Cmon I have like a 2.4 or some shit, it could be worse
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Vatican City State1650 Posts
On March 25 2010 07:02 baller wrote:
Ahahaha.
I had come out of the counselor's office when I thought of making this blog. You really think I want to brag about this?
A 3.8 in a UC isn't anything to brag about. With the work I had put in, I was fully expecting the highest honors. It was pretty devastating for it to be shown in my face, how it's impossible.
Along with that, I was informed that this year's graduates with a 3.8 and 3.9 gpa still were not admitted to top engineering grad schools like stanford and MIT.
Both these factors contributed to my making this blog.
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United States22883 Posts
On March 25 2010 07:05 orgolove wrote:
Along with that, I was informed that this year's graduates with a 3.8 and 3.9 gpa still were not admitted to top engineering grad schools like stanford and MIT.
Because they care about your test scores/statement of interest/interview more.
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Summa come quietly as well.
ninja edit to prevent getting warned/banned for bad joke worthless post: maybe you should consider going to trade school and entering a field with high demand but not too many people going into it...like maybe plumbing or fixing cars (I don't know the specifics but in high school they fed us all this propaganda about hao people who go to trade school make more than university graduates on average and even though the gov't probably just wants to spend less on post-secondary education, at least some of the propaganda must have been true).
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I am a grad (PhD) student in Carnegie Mellon Uni, Chemical Engineering, and I can tell you they don't care about your GPA as much as your research experience and your Statement of Purpose. To make you feel better, my GPA was 3.65
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Vatican City State1650 Posts
Oh. That's so much better to hear.
I did research in two summer REU programs as well as two years of outside research (although I have not had anything published). I can get two strong references at least, and possibly two more. My GRE score right now is 1440, but I'm hoping to improve that this summer.
The thing that bothers me most is that the graduates this year with 3.9 gpa also had one published research, and yet did not get into any top grad schools...
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United States2969 Posts
Your GPA of 3.8 doesn't mean as much as you think it does, sorry to burst you bubble. GPA is just used as a cutoff point for the majority of graduate schools and employers. You could have a 5.0 GPA with Giga Cum Laude and still not get a job/admittance if you are socially inept and write a generic letter of intent. You need to stop worrying about grades and gain some practical knowledge.
Want proof? I had a 3.2 GPA and got a full-ride to the #1 ranked school in my field.
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Vatican City State1650 Posts
There is no "bubble" to burst. I'm not boasting about it.
What field are you in?
What did you write in your letter of intent?
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You don't know how important interviews are for admittance into top grad schools. (Coming from a guy who knows some realllllly smart people who didn't make it into MIT and some really chill guys who weren't necessarily as "smart" in the sense of high grades, yet reported that they had great interviews and did get in [although one of 'em was really poor so that might have factored in]). Besides, if you really need to, you can always explain your predicament to the admissions officer (about graduating cum laude etc.) just as you did in this blog, in which case the reasoning for do so will look entirely like the graph:
On March 25 2010 07:02 baller wrote:
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I got a 3.77 and graduated top of my major... but didn't get suma cum laude because I didn't finish in the top 5% or w/e of engineering as a whole. Lol life isn't fair ;P
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Oh no, you got. 3.8! You are royally fucked in the ass, sir.
You're seriously asking this? You will be fine, don't sweat it.
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United States2969 Posts
On March 25 2010 07:29 orgolove wrote:
There is no "bubble" to burst. I'm not boasting about it.
What field are you in?
What did you write in your letter of intent?
I'm in Petroleum engineering. The trick for writing letters of intent is displaying your interest in a very specific and interesting aspect of whatever field you're going into. It helps if the school you apply to is known for that area of research. For example, I wrote about being interested in "reservoir forecasting while implementing EOR" and it just so happened that there was a dude doing the exact same thing in the department.
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Vatican City State1650 Posts
OOh. That's a great advice. Thank you.
I should do research on the individual professors then.
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