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Graduate with Bad Grades or Repeat a Year?
An anonymous reader asks: "I'm a CS Student within one year of graduation. Due to financial reasons, I've been working on a full time basis for the past 2 years, and I've worked on an open source project. This has brought me from the B's and A's of my first two years of college to somewhere in the mists of C's and lower. I now have enough money to sustain myself for two years of schooling. I've got two choices: repeat one year, repair all my bad grades and graduate with better grades but with a mark that I repeated one school year; or graduate with lower grades but with no repeated year. I'd like to know the opinion of recruiters out there: if you had two candidates which ranked similarly during the interviews, would you choose someone who repeated classes for higher grades?"
Showing that you had the drive to go back and do better, scoring higher, and learning even more, would be enough to show me that you had motivation which could translate to the job. Of course, the problem is I probably wouldn't even look at your grades -- I might just check to see if you graduated and choose to check into other qualifications. In which case you might be wasting a year by going back, because that's one more you could've had either looking for the right job or already being in the right job and making money.
:)
Sorry I couldn't be more help
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
As an employer, grades really aren't a top concern. I graduated with 2.85, I know skills go beyond grade. An interview is really where I'd make my decision.
Don't bother to repeat stuff. Just do the best you can with the courses you have and try to bring up your overall GPA with a solid finish. Employers aren't generally going to be too concerned with how you did in individual courses.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Graduating is important, but in almost 10 years out of college I have yet to see grades matter in the real world.
I always had poor grades and my income is in the top 10% and I love my work. I have a few friends who got very good grades in college that don't earn as much and hate their jobs. YMMV.
All most recruiters seem to care about is that you have a degree and where you came from. The real question you should be asking yourself is "Did I learn the material?" and if not "Is this material worth learning (aka is the reason for my bad grades a CS class)?".
If you answer yes to the first question I wouldn't worry about going back.
If you answer no to the second question I wouldn't worry about going back. A D+ in History is nothing to be proud of but won't hurt your ability to program.
Which leaves us with you if you answer yes to the second question hell yes go back.
Also remember statistically you will probably never go back to college if you leave so if you have any remaining fears go ahead and repeat the year. You might even be able to pick up a minor in something if your credits line up right. Better to fix it now then being haunted by it later.
I keep telling myself I'm not the desperate type.
You'd be better served by spending that 2 years focusing on a graduate degree - if you can get into a school.
The masters degree will most likely trump the bachelors degree, even if the guy with the bachelors has better grades. And in many places you'll automatically start at a higher salary.
Plus with the masters program you should be able to tailor your coursework to focus on the things that truly interest you.
On the other hand, few recruiters are going to ask you how long you were in school, and on top of that, so many people these days are doing a non-traditional route to completing a "4-year" program. Don't put your GPA's on your school lines of your resumes. They're not needed.
Where I work (a Fortune 500), merely having the degree will meet the education requirement that will get you through the automated screening system. At that point, it will be your experience and the way you present yourself that will matter.
So, only repeat if you really really want to. The GPA is probably not important. And if you must keep going to school, consider a graduate degree.
One last caveat, if you have specific employers you want to work for, contact people who work there. Schedule "informational interviews" with people who do the kind of work you want to do. Find out from them what is most important.
Good luck.
The degree is good, but it isn't worth any where as much as the demonstration of your coding skills and how well you can work with others.
Just graduating is sufficient IF you can show solid code, good practices and the ability to work with others on that project.
I'd lead with the project and just leave everything else as resume filler.
The only time grades matter is in getting your first job. After that, references and a good resume will be all you need. I didn't have great grades when I finished school - it made getting my foot in the door for that first job harder, but since then, I've been offered every position I've applied for. What matters most is if you're good at what you do.
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
If you feel that you did so badly in the classes that you didn't learn the material, and the material is something you feel is something that you should know, and you didn't pick up even enough to fill in the gaps on your own, then by all means take over if you have the time and money.
However, a year is too much of your life to spend on society's trivia, if that is all it amounts to. Why blow a whole year, which is at least a percent of your life and probably 3 percent of your most productive part of life, to check off some goddamn corporate bureaucrat's checkbox ? You don't live in Mao's China or Stalin's Russia where everything must be done by the book or your family might starve. These corporate HR fags are not the gatekeepers to your only chance at happiness. A huge portion of the IT and computer industry has no education at all, a huge portion of us work on contract basis where our resumes are not examined, a lot of people start their own businesses. Worst of all, inside 10 years the majority of the people studying with you, whether they graduate with straight A's or fail out, will not be working in the IT industry at all. The dumb ones will have moved "up" into management, the ambitious ones will have started their own companies and have hired other people to do all the technical work, and only a few will be doing any coding or IT type stuff.
There is one and only one reason to repeat that year of school: if you are not married, and fear not being able to find a wife in the all-male world of IT. Even then, I would not repeat the same classes, I would take more classes in a different area.
I just graduated with a pretty high GPA. In my experience, the high GPA is helpful to get to the top of the resume stack, but by the time you get into interviews they don't really care what your GPA is. If you have other eye-catching things on your resume that will get you to the interview phase (it sounds like you do) you might not need the GPA.
However, grad schools DO care about GPA. If you're ever planning to go back, it might be worth it to retake the classes.
I got out of college about 2 years ago. I had also been working full time during the last two years. In fact, I was working so much I decided to take off a semester, then of course I never went back. It hasn't seemed to matter. I've worked for auction houses and banks writing websites and hardware integrations. I've never talked to a recruiter and I don't plan to. Now I've started my own contracting business.
Here is my point, I wouldn't sweat it if I was you. Graduate, yes, but don't worry about the grades. D is for degree. College is about learning, make the most out of that and continue on. This advice will change depending if you are going for a masters later.
as an occasional interviewer, I have no knowledge of what classes you've taken or repeated. I would only know that if I asked for a transcript, which I wouldn't. HR might call and verify the GPA, but I wouldn't weigh it too heavily if you have work experience that mitigates the poor GPA. A company can''t get your transcript without your permission. Many large companies won't talk to you if you have under 3.5 GPA or some such bs. The same companies are often not considered good employers.
Focus on your strengths. OSS work does count as work experience, but only if it's verifiable work. You can even provide the code you contributed as an example of your work. Doing so provides potential employers a good example of the kind of work they could expect from you. Such a step is really only useful if the OSS project keeps records of who contributes what code. If I can't verify your sources, I may not believe you.
Consider the math. 20k to repeat a year. 60k you won't earn. 80k opportunity cost of repeating a year, plus or minus interest.
Bottom line, repeat the course if you really think you need to learn the material. Otherwise, just bone up of the material during all your free time and get on with your life.
but they certainly do matter if you're just out of college.
Your transcript will show your grades sinking lower as the courses get harder. That's not a good sign. If you try to explain it by telling your interviewer that you were "busy working on an open source project", that's actually a turn off. Are you going to slack off at work, read slashdot, and develop open source projects on company time? There are plenty of college graduates who managed to keep a decent GPA.
You can always keep your options open. Go through on-campus recruiting and see what happens. If you don't like the result, you can always go back to school.
What work did you do full time? If you were in an IT-related position, definitely don't repeat courses. You'll do fine in your job search based on your experience. If, on the other hand, you worked full time at McDonalds, you can still demonstrate your experience on the open source project.
Experience means more than grades. Many CS grads have poor grades. You will probably be pleasantly surprised when you go through on-campus recruiting.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
I ended up dropping out of mine completely... but then again that was because I realised the course was just a 2 year long advertisement for overpriced products I'd never use in a real job. Hopefully you're not in that situation.
It's, "... somewhere in the midst of Cs," not, "... somewhere in the mists of Cs," though even this correction does not repair your overall syntax. My point is, as an employer I also look at other abilities such as proper grammar and spelling, not to mention verbal communication. You might be the smartest IT guy this side of the local galactic super-cluster, but it's all for naught if I haven't a clue what you're trying to get across to me. I would suggest that in addition to repeating one year of Computer Science that you also freshen up on English grammar and spelling. By repeating the year you not only better your grades you will, in most likelihood, better your understanding of the subject matter, which will indicate to a perspective employer/recruiter that you view your education as important, not just something you rushed through because you were in a hurry to start making money. That's my opinion, I welcome yours.
No one will care about your college grades after your first year of work. After that it is all experience, skills, and relationships.
Peter
Downsize DC Today!
But I would check your transcripts and see all your Ds' and Fs' if I were interviewing you.
In this day and age I would not care if you took longer if you had a real job or changed majors. It happens all the time but grades represent intelligence and dedication which mean higher productivity.
http://saveie6.com/
The only *practical* reason I can see is that most graduate schools prefer or require a 3.0 undergrad GPA. But given your paid and unpaid outside experience I doubt anyone else will care about your grades.
If you can't work on OSS and go to school at the same time, put the OSS on a back-burner and take care of priorities - OSS isn't going to feed you and family. Pick it up again once you've settled into a job. I've found that a timely degree is more important than grades. Just finish this year making the best grades you can get and boost your GPA as much as you can and be happy with what you get - in the end it's a degree. But stop goofing off and get serious about it - that's what's going to count to recruiters.
The key to understanding whether or not you should re-take a course is whether or not that course is really fundamental. If it is something core to the area you wish to work in, and you feel that you missed mastering the topic then yes, do retake it, or at least take something in the same area to butress your knowledge.
Grades after your first job are not very important. But mastery of the subject material is a life-long tool for career advancement.
That's what they're for.
Deleted
Try to retake classes with different professors. I had a pretty high GPA, but I retook 2 of my core classes with different professors, just to get a different view. I majored in mathematics and physics, not CS, but I found that retaking with a different professor has improved my skills in different areas. While GPA is important in some cases (Grad School), knowing the material and being comfortable with it will have a larger impact on your success.
Live Long and Prosper
At the bottom of the
graduates last in his class at medical school?
Doctor. :-)
Many large companies won't talk to you if you have under 3.5 GPA or some such bs ...
... The same companies are often not considered good employers.
You are misinformed. Many large companies do have flexibility on GPAs. Specifically, GPA "minimums" are often waived if the student was also working more than 30 hours per week. Note the person asking for advice wrote "I've been working on a full time basis for the past 2 years".
I believe this statement is about as accurate as your first.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'd vote for finishing school as soon as possible. The BS is worth something but after your first job the grades won't matter.
As a firmware engineer of 27 years I'm much more interested in:
the candidate's presence (i.e. how well they handle themselves),
the extra-curriculars (are they REALLY interested in the things they work on? Do they have a passion for anything? Open source projects are good, ham radio license or private pilot is better),
and for how complete their knowledge is of the things they say they know.
Education/Accedemia is NOT the same as the real world and showing that you can spend all sorts of time working for a university is NOT as impressive as showing me that you can work for me, AND for yourself.
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
You still have time. And it's midsts, with a d. Unless it's particularly foggy in the classrooms at your school.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
I've had the responsibility of screening candidates for "new hire" positions in my company. I hardly had time to even read each person's resume in full, let alone request transcripts and what not. GPA was one of the major factors I looked at when evaluating the candidates (the other major factor was whether the candidate had any key words under work experience, skills, etc. that seemed to match up well with the sort of things that my development team does). In fact, I wound up calling a few people whose GPA's weren't exactly stellar if their listed skills were especially well matched with exactly what we were looking for. If the candidate then did well in the interview (i.e., they were able to demonstrate that they managed to learn something while in school), then the transcript really become inconsequential. Through that whole process, I found that there was a surprising number of people with 3.8+ GPA's who were shockingly incompetent.
If your overall GPA is below 3.5, you probably want to bring that up, since a good chunk of recruiters won't even look at your resume if it's too far down on the stack, which is usually sorted by GPA.
I've been working on a full time basis for the past 2 years, and I've worked on an open source project.
Emphasize the full time job. Many companies have "minimum" GPAs, but that is pretty much due to the volume of resumes that have school and no practical experience. Long long ago when I was graduating an IBM rep told me that the GPA min would not apply to me since I had been working full time (30+ hours per week). The job was software development, that helped even more.
Unless your job has nothing to do with software development I'd drop the open source project. Spend the time on better grades in your remaining classes. Nearly all open source projects are irrelevant and regardless of whether it is fair or not assumed to be a low quality effort. Exceptions involve extremely well known projects, well known outside the FOSS community that is, or something that is specifically related to the company you are hoping to join.
What was the difference between Ace Rimmer and Arnold Rimmer?
Now what you do depends on the quality of the place you are at, and what the spread of marks you have is. Certainly a lack of good marks in coursework due to time restraints is not going to look good, because that's valuable experience missing.
I'm certainly a fan of using popular TV shows dictate the actions one should take in life.
I have interviewed quite a few potential hires and can say that I spent little time looking at the education other than to see if they had the right skill set. The grades tell you nothing, what is important is that you prove to the employer that you are the right person at the right time with the right skills. Everything else is window dressing.
If you think that your current knowledge is insufficient then by all means repeat the year. If you would not learn anything that would justify the extra year, then go on and put your focus on getting better scores in the coming year...
Coldmoon over Dark water...
A degree is nothing more than a piece of paper which certifies that you can get boring shit assigned to you done. In essence, this is all an employer cares about when hiring graduates. It does not guarantee a minimum level of knowledge or skills.
At the same time, education facilities are running a business. They want to maximise profit, which is where students come in. However, they are also competing against other education facilites, so they dont want to squeeze too hard, otherwise you will take your money elsewhere.
Having looked back at my 'academic' life, all I really needed to have is the minimum 2-3 year tertiary diploma / degree (which is called differently from country to country). This provides the above mentioned certificate (get boring shit done). After a year in the industry, degrees no longer matter, it's all based on experience and specialisation. Shit, I should know, I'm an electronic engineer by education, and 7 years later, I'm a software architect in a company with 120 software engineers. I've advanced faster in this company than people with masters degrees and excellent academic marks.
If you wish to work in academia, its a different story. But then again, if you specialise in a new field untouched by academia, guess who'll be knocking at your door once the 'education business' decides it needs celebrity names to entice a new generation of students.
Revolution = Evolution
I had a class on building programming languages where the entire course was based around the instructor's research project / graduate project / etc. The second I heard "this is the toolkit I created for verifying programming language construction, most of the assignments and 90% of the class material will be using this toolkit to verify your work -- now it is still kind of flakey so part of this will be testing the system against the textbook material", I walked out and dropped the class.
If you think learning a proprietary tool is bad, how about doing someone's work for them (testing the system) on a tool that no one will ever use. (Let alone pay $3,000 for the course for the "honor" to do so)
I can't stress enough that you will, at some point, regret it if you graduate with bad grades. Having an extra year of school won't matter at all to most recruiters or schools (if you decide to try grad programs). I had a bad first year in school due to medical problems. I had surgery over the summer and did very well for the next 3 years. My school did not let me repeat those first year classes and I have been suffering ever since from one bad year. Without knowing your specific grades I can't say much else but for example if you have less than a 3.0/4.0 GPA and that extra year will bring you above a 3.0 then I don't think you should even consider any alternatives.
I've got a friend who just graduated in physics with a 2.85. You know what phrase gets him to work? "Cleanup on aisle 6." Thats right, he's a janitor at the Wal-Mart next to campus (Purdue).
Granted, physics is slightly different as a field than CS. So heres another argument. Someone mentioned this: Tuition of 20k + lost wages of 60k for one year of school is an opportunity cost of 80k. Well, if you want to work for a top company like Procter and Gamble (where I'm currently working) those extra GPA points will probably get your resume to the top of the stack. Why is that important? Because P&G recruits what they proclaim as the "Best of the best." And they really do. Forbes didn't rank P&G's employees #1 in the world for having a reputation for innovation and intelligence for shits and giggles. Regardless of your GPA, you'll start at the same salary, but first you've gotta get that far.
ObDisclaimer: I work for an Engineering college and am a part-time student. This is my opinion, not my school's.
As others have mentioned, the opportunity cost of taking that year off is a big deal. If you've been participating in projects and work outside of school, that is a Good Thing and will help you get a not-too-horrible first job out of school. Since money is looking to be a problem otherwise, save what you can and find a paletable flexible/online grad curriculum as soon as you can if you want to make up for a subpar bachelor's GPA. If you live in California, the Software Engineering (Online-only) Master's program at Fullerton is a great deal IMHO.
Your first job is unlikely to care about your undergrad grades. Your subsequent jobs won't care AT ALL. That said, you may want to keep a list of your weaker topics and review those that you aren't getting drilled on in industry. In my case, many language- and automata-related topics (e.g. grammars, push-down automata, Turing machines, computability) haven't really been hammered too much in my day-to-day work, but they've come in handy on occasion after taking the classes.
It also wouldn't hurt to live in a place with a lot of opportunity to get interesting work (like Silicon Valley) for a few years.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
Truer words were never spoken. The things that are good for your academic career are poison for your working life. Education is all about your personal growth. Work isn't. There is zero correlation between your marks and how well you will do on the job. Zero. (There are many studies that prove that point.)
... runon sentences make one short of breath.)
What will get you ahead on the job is your interpersonal skills. Get a job if you can or do more education if you have to. If you have good enough marks to get into a master's program, so much the better. Other posters have suggested that you do a master's but it seems to me that if you can get into a master's program, then your marks don't suck, which was the point of your question. (puff puff
No matter what you do, start working on your interpersonal skills. Join whatever professional organization you qualify for and go to the meetings and presentations. As the parent points out, becoming a radio amateur is a very good idea. You would be amazed at the people who are hams. (Presidents of companies, presidents of countries).
...finish yours.
I studied physics briefly at the University of Chicago, then ran low on money and went to a Big 12 school to study engineering physics and mathematics. I was never a particularly good student, but that didn't mean that I didn't understand the material or that I didn't learn from my courses. If anything, the coursework encouraged me to explore more and more, and my grades suffered as a result of my extended exploration in the subject matter. By the time I found what I really loved, it was too late. I took my senior design lab course, learned a ton, performed phenomenally well, only to be accused of cheating by the associate dean of engineering. He could only back it up with my transcript, and judged me despite the the corroboration of my work by my peers and professors. Long story short, I told the associate dean he could burn in hell and left. Now, my engineering senior design project was graded by real engineers in industry, and one of them knew that this cheating accusation was a load of bullshit and hired me regardless. A couple years later, I have brought several projects to completion successfully for that company and am one of two R&D engineers for aerospace systems. Additionally, I am a committee chairman in an aerospace industry consortium, a board member for the county committee on science and engineering education, hold a patent for a device I recently invented, will have my invention featured on a show on a widely watched informative cable television channel, and have papers published for NASA, NSF, and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). By all accounts, things look like they are going well.
But you know what? I can't leave. I can't go anywhere. I'm stuck. Not a single other company that does the work I have _demonstrated in the real world_ that I am good at gives a damn because I had bad grades and haven't finished a degree. I have bombarded companies with resumes. I have talked to hiring managers. I've had friends who have worked at these companies drop my name. None of it seems to do any good.
Finish the degree.
Easy, repeat the grade. There are a lot more attractive girls at college than in the real world!
Why not send your resume out and see what sort of response you get? If some company you like pops up w/ a kick-ass job for you, then this question becomes moot.
Haha
You're the garbage, jackass.
Yummy, unreasonably angry nerdsniping. Let me get my tissues and a handful of Crisco and you prepare another gem.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
If you were working on a project in your spare time and can demonstrate deep knowledge of that, you'll have a good leg up in the interview. I've interviewed people for software positions for nearly 10 years now, and not once has the question of grades ever come up, nor have I ever cared about it. It may be the case that certain institutions use grades as a first-cut sort of thing, but none of the places I have worked at, including at least one very large software company, ever used it to my knowledge. If, for some bizarre reason, you find yourself denied application based on grades, just look elsewhere. You *will* find a job if you are even half-competent. And once you have that first job on your resume, your education could read "G.W.B.'s School of Foreign Policy" and it won't matter. Incidentally, I have personally found the reverse to be true as well. Graduating from some big name school with honors really doesn't mean that much either. Essentially no matter how smart you were in school, you will be low man on the totem pole - and with good reason - no matter where you step in (there are some rare exceptions mostly surrounding research.) Most of us who have been in the industry a while know better that to trust the contents of a resume. I'm more interested in if you've done things before which would apply to the job you are interviewing for. So make sure they know about your open source project, provide a link to the website for it, and even give a few bullet points about what you did on the project. That'll go a long way if a real human reads your sheet.
If I'd interview you and you'd tell me that you repeated one year to get higher scores (and that you got low scores because you were working) I'd say that would be a plus. On the other hand I value work experience higher than a degree: I've seen too many people who come from university and can't code their way out of a paper bag. And noone will ask for your score if you have a few years of work experience (it's more important to say "I've worked on this project, implemented that, etc. pp."). So I'd personally recommend finishing your degree, but I think it's way more important that you do what you feel more comfortable with. Repeating a year isn't bad, IMHO, and if you feel safer with better scores then do that.
If you're even considering applying for graduate school in the next five years, I would take the extra year and improve your grades in the upper level classes. In graduate school, they are more interested in your grades in upper level classes, and your GRE test scores. Because basically, you will be doing the same old shit in graduate school that you would be doing in the upper level classes; in a lot of places, you might be a TA in classes! So for graduate school, they want to see that you are a good student. However, if you plan to work for a decade or more, and then go to graduate school, your grades in your bachelor program will matter less ( but they will still matter more than in the job hunt)
If you are just going work the rest of your life, you don't have to worry as much about grades. They are the first hurdle you have to clear in the job hunt, but the people who will be looking at them won't really care. It's either job recruiters, who might have a GPA threshold under which they will not consider you, or managers from the company, who didn't particular care for their classes when they were in school. They might view academia as an impractical ivory tower. High scores, like magna cum laude, might indicate to them that you are kind of idealist, better cut out for grad school or research, perhaps not willing to put up with compromise and other pragmatics of corporate life, or won't find corporate work interesting enough for your superior intellect. I've never worked a corporate job, just heard horror stories from friends about BS in the corporate world out-weighing academic BS.
It really depends on how 'bad' your grades are. If your GPA is under 3.0, I would consider raising them. Since you seem like you are more interested in a job than academics, you might start the job hunt, and then go back to grad school if the job is unsatisfying. But in order to get into a decent grad program, you should have at least a 3.0, and good GRE scores -- so don't burn the GPA bridge just yet. You might also go ahead and take the GREs now, while the information is fresh in your mind, and you are still in test taking mode. That would give you a better idea about how well grad school applications will go if the job market doesn't pan out.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you go to say Johns Hopkins or Yale - a 2.9 there probably can count for more than say a 3.5 at the Short Hills Institute of Technology. But often people overlook that fact. You might want to take that into consideration. Your education is probably much better, but some interviewers only see the number.
I've seen a bunch of people get into Medical school with a 3.5 from some little no name college, and others get denied from a prestigious University because of low grades 2.9 (where the competition if much, much tougher).
..........FULL STOP.
If you are planning on going to graduate school, right after college, then I would say retake them. If you are not going to graduate school soon, then get your degree and start work. After a year or two of work, grades are not important at most employeers.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
You don't get grades here. It is either pass or fail.
Some will want to know your GPA. Most just want to know you got the little piece of paper that says you've reached a certain level of academic achievement.
If you really want to set yourself apart, don't repeat, don't finish, but keep moving forward and get your masters degree.
Since I finished school myself in 2001, I've been working for the same company doing programming and other various tasks. In that time, I've had a chance to sit down with the other folks from my school (Cornell) to go over the various resumes that we pick up each year, looking for interns and/or full time hires. So I'm certainly not a HR person with loads of hiring experience, but I've had some with the sort of thing you're asking.
So I'll start with the good news - the bottom line is that what's on your resume only matters to a degree, and who you really "are" and what you can do and have done matters far more, especially after your first job. I'll give you total benefit of the doubt here - if you really bombed those classes because you needed the time to work to get money, than that's a very solid excuse to a recruiter (or at least, to me), and I would happily forgive it. What's more, grades in of themselves are only so important - I finished with about a 2.9 GPA or so, and landed what is for me a dream job. I didn't even list my GPA on my resume (though many folks will flag that, 'why isn't it listed, must be hiding something').
In your specific case, if the bad grades are in classes that matter, like core CS programming, etc., and you are 100% sure you would ace or do well in them the next go around, I would stay. The reasoning is it proves your excuse, and that you didn't just slack. If they're mostly in classes that don't "matter", like creative writing, then don't bother. I personally had to repeat two classes to graduate (though I still finished in 4 years).
Given all that though, I wouldn't focus on your classes anyway as far as getting a job. Remember, every kid from your major has taken more or less the same classes and done the same in-class projects. What else have you done? You said you worked on some OS stuff - emphasize that. You had to work full-time - if that's CS related, emphasize that. If you've got a strong personality that works well, show it off. Those are the things that stick in my mind when I'm going through the paper resumes later on. A good example of that was one I saw last year - on paper, this guy was sharp, near 4.0, etc., etc., seemingly a clear winner. But in person, next to no verbal skills, unfriendly, etc. He was immediately tossed in the bad pile.
There are lots of opportunities to get job interviews without the interviewer even seeing your grades (such as job fairs). Those are perfect opportunities to show how much you know and explain those grades. Next up, how is your overall GPA? One year might drop it but if your over a 3.0 overall then dont worry about it. Finally, try to get a job anyways- if your having bad luck, then you may consider taking it again. There isn't any penalty for finishing in a longer amount of time (especially in CS, where finishing in 4 years is the more uncommon line in many schools). Once you get a job, your grades will still matter, but job performance will matter more. Odds are, you'll be trained to do something you cant even learn in school anyways.
You're first job out of school is a throw-away. Take what you can get and move on. Seriously. I've been a recruiter and employer (in IT). Send me your resume at robertATrjamestaylor.com and I'll get you placed -- once you graduate.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Just wondering if you can even repeat courses. I remember when I was an undergrad, unless you had a D, you couldn't repeat a course. Wasn't it like that at other places too?
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
When I left my GPA off my resume one year while I was looking for a work at my college's job fair, every recruiter I gave my resume to asked my GPA straight away. They penned it into the margin - Leaving it off didn't help anyone.
Some schools will replace your prior grades on your transcript with a denotation that the class was repeated if you retake the class within a certain time frame (usually the next available opportunity). However, this replacement happens whether your original grade was an F or a C, so if you're retaking mostly C grades, it may reflect more negatively if a recruiter looks through your transcript and sees a denotation for "we're not telling you what this grade was, but it was bad enough that s/he retook the course" than if they just see some Cs.
Regardless, your grades now won't matter much once you get one or two Real Jobs on your resume.
As long as you graduate, you'll fare better than people who drop out or go a different route. This old joke sums it all up:
Q: What do you call the med student who graduates last in his class?
A: "Doctor"
Trying to date your coworkers is trouble, but where else will you be spending time with tolerably intelligent young women?
It worked for me.
At another place, which initially hadn't noticed the OSS mention on my resume, it helped get me the job.
A supposed Law school joke:
What do you call a guy who graduates last in his class at law school?
Your Honor.
What do you call a guy who graduates last in his class in medical school?
Defendant.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Here is what I would do were I in your shoes. If you go back to school, you will actually lower your future potential income. I say this as someone who had low grades so I decided instead of going back and retaking classes, or instead of that, I probably would've taken OTHER classes that interested me, further reducing my GPA. I don't like doing homework you see. Go out there to a small company and try to get a job. You might have a problem getting in the door from your grades because let's face it, plenty of people ONLY look at grades until you are in an interview. Blow them away with your interview, blow them away with your willingness to work, and you'll do just fine. After 1.5 years and having paid off a brand new car, be sure to get yourself a nice new suit and start interviewing again. By this time your resume formatting should be WAY different than it was to get out of college, because let's face it, nobody wants to see college classes on a resume when you have real-world experience, they want to hear about how your program/abilities saved the company money and you can do the same for company 2, etc. I ended up changing jobs after 1.5 years (to the day) and am now making just under $15k higher than I was out of school and at the upper end of the payscale for someone my age in my industry at a small company. Large companies are different of course, but I like being more than just a number on a project nobody cares about. Anyways, I hope this helps. Have a good evening.
I've been a hiring manager for a while, and I've interviewed my fair share of fresh-out-of-school candidates. I never look at their grades. Sometimes people put graduated with honors, or dean's list, or cum laude on their resume, but it really doesn't factor into my decision making process at all. I've never been in the situation of having two people competing for the same spot and deciding it on grades. If I had to decide it would be based on experience or personality. The big thing they teach in hiring class is: can do, will do, will fit. "Can do" means can you do the job? Well, most people who aren't idiots and have at least a grounding in the basics can learn. "Will do" means are you going to be motivated? You can't teach motivation, so finding someone who likes the subject matter is crucial. Finally, there's "will fit" - will this person fit in with the corporate culture and the group? Ironically most people focus on "can do" in interview when it really is the least important. You can train people, but you can't teach motivation or compatibility! Don't do the year over again. Get out there and start being a good economic booster :)
no longer working for cnet
For what it's worth, I ran this question by my wife, a HR person. She replied that most of the companies she's done hiring for would be more interested in someone who did whatever it took to get the job done right; repeating the classes would be better. Obviously the ideal case is getting it done right the first time, but she felt that the work history and OSS contributions would be mitigating circumstances for why the grades weren't where you wanted them the first time. She's done a little high-tech recruiting/hiring but her primary focus was industrial workers, so take this advice how you will. HTH.
You didn't specify which project, or how you were involved, but if I was hiring for an engineering type now, that would speak volumes to me.
If you have a degree, you can follow the game plan. If you were a real contributor to an open source project that actually shipped, or got significant progress, you show real world experience, and that is desparately lacking in grads.
Don't repeat, don't include your GPA. If GPA required, don't lie about it, make sure you hilite the releavent real world in such a way that you pretty much have to see it when digging for that GPA.
Well, here's how Human Resources sees it:
Did you graduate:
[ ] Yes
[ ] No
Please select one.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
...and by extension, the size and composition of the firms that notice you.
There's no way to predict; I agree with those who say you'll master the curriculum, but of what use is it in the real world? I picked a company that preached Software Methodology, vs. the ones who wanted a truck routing system written in COBOL, all of their PL/I code converted to COBOL, or custom-built software for their airport parking garage with no specifications in sight. I relocated, scored very above-average pay, only to find that Ferranti International Controls Corporation played at Software Engineering. Any code review might feature the VP of Engineering, who was a pompous know-it-all who'd apparently never heard about leaving one's ego at the door. It would have been Hell, except that I caught a break and was tapped to fill a sudden opening on the UNIX Systems Support team, circa 1987. On top of that bonus, I got to work alongside Peter da Silva and Karl Lehenbauer, both of whom I still count as close friends. BTW, Peter and Karl were both dropouts; Peter makes quite the comfortable living, and Karl's a millionaire.
Go with your instincts, they're 100% correct. It's your conscious mind that'll steer you astray--or keep you standing still, wondering what to do. I presume that you're still young enough to recover from a mistake.
"Press to test."
(click)
"Release to detonate."
Go back a second year and see if you can't finagle a second degree. For example many CS degree curriculum are only two or three classes shy of a math degree if your school counts classes like formal linguistics as math classes.
Get higher grades and add value to your resume.
[signature]
I'm not sure that you've correctly identified the cause of your suffering.
;)
Obviously I don't know you or your situation, but I have a hard time believing that any hiring manager or admissions officer would blackball you for having a bad year while going through medical problems, and then once the problems were fixed you did great. Hell, my freshman grades were horseshit and that was because I was too drunk and high to do any better. Your excuse sounds a lot better than mine during an interview.
Have you considered that you are suffering because of some other issue in your credentials? How far are you getting in the hiring/admissions process?
Unless you are applying to med school, your story just doesn't compute.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
perhaps you're a pirate, and the bounding main awaits?
If I was hiring right now I would focus on your open-source experience. The fact that you have been involved in open source is by itself of higher importance than a full-time job or a university degree, according to my own criteria. The reason is that a person who gets into open source has showed initiative and a certain level of intelligence that cannot be assured by a day job or a programme of study. When you are a student, you are confined within the walls of an educational system, which often makes learning more difficult than it needs to be, so university is not the right environment to let your talent shine. When you become an employee, you are again working within the limitations of an environment which often distrusts any hint of creativity, and you are also likely to be granted limited responsibility. There are only two ways in which an intelligent recruiter can assess your real talent: Either from your hobbies (including open source) or from the way you manage your own business (if you have any self-employment or freelance experience, but I usually exclude most consulting occupations from my test). The way I would choose from a pile of applicants actually places A-graders at a disadvantage. I actually would prefer to hire a person with bad marks and many professional and personal interests rather than a graduate with high marks and little or no interests. After all, your grades measure only the time and effort you actually invested on your university education, and not your intelligence or ability. For me, grades fail to predict future performance, even academic. However, be warned that not everyone thinks like me in hiring decisions. Most HR recruiters at companies will probably focus on your work experience, while technical recruiters may also wish to hear about your open source involvement. Postgraduate university departments are less predictable: Many universities place too much emphasis on grades, while others are keen to accept students with work experience, open source involvement, and involvement in professional organisations (eg ACM, IEEE, BCS, IET, ACS). The problem with recruitment is that only an intelligent recruiter with freedom of action can choose the right staff, but in the real world many recruiters are either stupid, restricted by bureaucracy, or both. You have to choose what kind of recruiters to target. I think the best course of action is to take a hybrid integrative approach, attempting to keep your options as open as possible, therefore not excluding recruiters seeking high grades from your target list, especially if you wish to become a university professor someday. Even if you have bad marks now, you can try to get higher marks in a another programme, like these offered by the Open University (UK) or even complement your low-grade degree with a postgraduate qualification (perhaps a PgCert or PgDip if you can't wait for a full Master's) in another academic field (eg business management). The most important thing to remember is, however, the opportunity costs associated with day jobs and education. If you give all your time to an employer and/or a bunch of professors you may have not enough time to do somethign worthwile in your life, such as participating in open source. After you somehow get in the position of being able to pass most recruiters's tests (through grades or experience), I suggest that you invest your time as much as possible on a project that excites you, and this can be an open source project, self-employment, a charity, or anything else you believe you could excel at. Jobs and schools do have some value and should not be easily denounced, but you should always aim higher (if you do have the inate ability to climb higher, that is).
for cereal.
I am a junior recruiter, and I would say take the year over again, if grad school is not a possible. Few recruiters really care how fast you get your degree as long as you did a decent job with it. There are a million reasons in which people can take 5 years to get their degree, generally at my office we would ignore it and move on.
I'd advise on doing something you enjoy next to all those boring classes ...
That is what he had been doing, and that is what led to his current situation where he fears his poor grades will come back to haunt him.
Any hobby is potentially interesting during an interview, as you simply don't know who is sitting across the table.
No, you have misread the interviewer's interest. They don't really care about your specific project. They are merely interested in finding out that you had written some code for your own amusement or curiosity. It does not matter how silly or useless the project was, all that really matters is that the interviewee wrote it for the fun or curiosity of it. That demonstrates they have a genuine interest in programming, that they are not merely studying CS because someone told them it was a good career path. As I said before, there are rare exceptions where the personal project relates to the position being interviewed for. But honestly, we feign interest in your personal project to get you talking about it. It is difficult to get interviewees to talk about these projects.
In any case he's done the FOSS project, he's demonstrated he has a genuine interest in programming, additional FOSS work will not make him any more attractive of a candidate. Better grades might. Your "do what interests you" advice is premature, that's long term career advice, not short term "I need to graduate and get that first post-college job" advice.
...and he told me that he chose to repeat one year to improve his grades, i would only concider that as a positive decition, since that means that he:
1. Cares about his grades
2. Wants to improve his skills
3. Is willing to sacrifice one year of his life to become better in his area of expertise.
which basicly boils down to: I would prefer someone repeating a year.
this is probably the most boring sig in the world
Get a job *in a related field* while you do it. Degrees really mean surprisingly little, experience is what counts. Now of course being that you are starting your career you won't (and can't) have tons of experience but that doesn't mean you can't have some. Employers are often quite wary of kids that come out of university with high grades and no work experience. That tells them that the kid did nothing but focus on class, which doesn't mean they have any useful skills (it is quite possible to get good at school, not at the material school teaches).
Now if you've been working in a related field, then great. If not, then it is time to start. For computers a good route is often doing tech support of some kind on campus. It's not exactly what you are studying for (I'm assuming you want a CS degree to be a programmer) but it is fairly related. There's generally lots of student tech support jobs on campus. They may not be glamorous, but it is what you should look at.
Not only will a job like this help you out in terms of resume, but it is a good way to get good references. It is all well and good to have some people you know that will say you are good, much better to have people who you worked for in a tech field say you are good.
If you aren't willing or able to do something like that, I'm not really sure repeating a year will get you that much more. This is especially true since the university may limit the number of classes you can take GRO (meaning classes that will replace the old grade). Replacing a C class with an A does a decent bit GPA wise, but retaking the same class and having both the C and A do very little, especially after 4 years. Just upping your GPA probably won't be the magic job getter you hope unless you do something else.
Also, and I can't stress this enough, the real way to get jobs is through personal references. Many, probably even most, jobs go to someone who knows someone at the company. People just worry about hiring random applicants. They are much more comfortable if someone vouches for that person. It can even be something quite indirect, like some guy in another division fires off an e-mail to the hiring guy saying "Hey you've got a Mr. X applying for a job, he's a friend's kid and is a good guy, give him a look will you?" and it helps.
For that matter you can even get jobs that never were posted in the first place. Some guy says to his friends "You know, we really could use another coder for this project," his friend who knows you says "I might know a guy who'd be interested." You get an interview and land a job that was never posted anywhere.
This is also something that working in a related field will help with. If you work for university tech support, they probably know a few people out in the industry and maybe they have help you get a job. I know I did for one of our students. He was looking for a job, I knew a place that was hiring that I used to work for that could probably use him. I recommended him, they interviewed and hired him. He never would have known about this job had I not told him (since he wasn't looking where it was posted) and a significant part of their decision was based on the fact that I said "Yes, I think he'll do a good job."
So really, if you decide to go back to school, don't do it just for the grades, do it to get experience. If you don't, it probably is a waste of time and money. In terms of getting you a job, school only really helps with your first one. It's all experience, and who you know, after that.
But I suspect most of them are more like this (background), this, this, this or this.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I'd definitely go with the fellow/gal who worked his way through school.
If you are going to an Ivy League college most of the time you don't even need to worry about grades, you're pretty much going to get a good job because of where you went. Our president even bragged about being a C student. Even people with good grades have a hard time getting a job these days, with the bachelors degree basically like the high-school diploma of yesteryear. You can always play the Open Source Project bit up. Sometimes jobs go to the best personality in the interview, rather than skill.
When I was in my teenage years, I developed clinical depression (unknowm to me at the time). I also worked 3 years without a proper holiday from the ages of 16 to 19 whilest being in full time education. My bad moods, inability to sleep, gradual descent from straight As to failing grades was put down to laziness and a bad attitude.
I put on a brief spurt in my first year at university, managing to finish the year with somewhere between a 2:2 and a 2:1.
By the time I was 19 and in my second year I was getting 20% in exams, drinking way too much and hacking at my flesh with knives and razorblades. Life was nothing but pain, suffering and humiliation. To top it all, I was beating myself up for being stupid, lazy and weak.
I tried to get help, but they sent me to a right-wing fascist psychiatrist who blamed everything on laziness and the Permissive Society, told me to pull my socks up and get on with it.
When it came to the end-of-year exams in 2nd year, I couldn't bring myself to fail. I should have done, so that I could redo the year, but I couldn't stand the shame. I stayed awake for days on end frantically cramming for the exams, and scraped 30%, which meant I have to go and be publically humiliated by the Professor of Physics, but allowed to continue on the course.
I wasn't for returning for 3rd year, but friends and family were kind and supportive (at last) and persuaded me go back. So I went straight to see my 2nd year tutor and explained (which took a great deal of courage because I felt so utterly wretched). He saved my life. Prof. Bernard F. Schutz listened sympathetically and got me some counselling.
In my 3rd year, I worked very hard, especially on my project, trying to scrape together as many marks as possible, and trying hard to learn as much as I could of the stuff I'd failed on, but my brain was like spaghetti. I graduated, with Honours, but only a 3rd :-(
In the many years since, I have been treated with therapy and drugs and have held down 3 significant jobs in the nuclear and software industries, but I am haunted by my 3rd class degree.
Even now, 12 years later, prospective employers want to know what I got, and many don't want to know if you have anything less than a 2:! or a 1st.
My advice: If you have the opportunity to do it again, better, take that opportunity.
Go slit your fucking wrists fucktards.
For my 2 cents, I'd say stay in academia for as long as you can afford it: either go on and get a masters, or stick around and re-do the final year.
If you're actually interested in CS, and not just in it for the money, there's always a metric ton of lecture modules that you can sit in on. This will give you a breadth of knowledge that just isn't going to be available to you at work.
If you're in for the money, then well go ahead, go work for the man. But academia is the easiest place to join/start a startup.
As for grades; well yes, my place does look at grades, even for senior roles. Experience is easy to get, it just takes time. But not everywhere is the same.
Did you get paid to design the business cards?
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
There is no replacement for a year of your life. Ignore every single idiot who tells you grades are important. If your grades are that important compared to you, your time and your actual work output then to be blunt you are not very important to anyone. If you can't use that extra year to do something more worthy than get grades, then you're a lump of useless carbon anyhow.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
The question becomes one of whether you want jam today or jam tomorrow, the system isn't geared to let you have both, which to me is a clear demonstration of the flaws in the modern system. Why? Because medium-term jobs will penalize you for having poor jobs early on, if you choose the long-term path, and you will only start to see results ten or so years on from graduation. That's a long time to lose money and it's questionable as to whether the profits later will compare to the lost interest.
On the other hand, ten years on, nobody will give a damn about the grades, they will only care that you are listed as failing/repeating a year, of you take the short-term path, which s Bad News. In other words, after that critical time when college scores cease to matter and early references have long-since vanished, your earning power will drop and your marketability will suffer. If a typical career lasts 30 years, then you've profited on 10 but lost on 20.
All this is moot, of course, if you have a thirty-year career with the same place, but those who retire with the golden watch are becoming increasingly rare. If you have very few jobs, then the better grades will lead to better prospects. If, as happens a lot these days, sustainability suffers, then that's not the way to do it.
Personally, I'd say don't worry about it, join a professional society or two that ONLY accepts people of good standing, and utilize the hell out of the association. Professional societies and certain certifications count for more than all the grades and education in the world.
(I'll just add that if American education worked on the premise that better-trained employees do more and earn more for the company and country, you wouldn't have needed to do so much on the side, and therefore would already have the good grades.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Did you get low grades because you did not have the time to do some of the work, or because you did not learn the material? If you don't know your stuff, you aren't going to do well in the interview, and you are better off staying in school another year.
If you do know the material, you can offer an explanation for your low grades and show your knowledge in the interview. In this case, I would graduate and look for a job. Don't include your GPA on your resume. Instead emphasize your open source project experience and possibly some challenging course projects. After you have a couple of years work experience, no one will look at your GPA.
As a senior software developer, here's what I look for in a candidate fresh out of school. Yes, I do look at your GPA. Some of the best programmers that I have worked with had excellent grades from first rate schools, so I am somewhat prejudiced here. I also look to see that you have a firm background in your course work, such as data structures, and object oriented programming. But the most important thing is the interview. I look for in depth knowledge in a least one area. I think that if an applicant has learned one thing well, they have the ability to learn the things needed for our work.
If your open source work is good, you can use that to your advantage. Bring some example code to the interview, and be prepared to discuss it. I can tell more about a candidate's coding skills from looking at his code than from any other source.
As a hiring manager in a Fortune 500 company, I can tell you that your grades are FAR FAR FAR less important than *any* practical work experience you can show me. We check "Did you graduate?" "What area was the degree?" For what it's worth, I've known polysci and English majors who could outcode lots of CS and EE nerds.
Don't get me wrong, EE and CS are great, but some people with degrees in them stink at writing code. Some who can really write code are TERRIBLE to work with because they are convinced that they are smarter than everyone and social skills are unimportant. NOTE - "House" is a TV show. TV is not reality.
Frankly it's important to note that HR is never on your side. HR's job is to make sure that the company complies with the law and that the company will win if ever sued. Interestingly, at my company HR is really not helpful to the hiring manager, either. Frequently my interests in filling a position are at odds with their interests in "following their procedures." Also, this is not uncommon in large firms.
Get REAL work experience. We don't believe you really know much of anything when we hire a recent grad, and we expect that we will have to train you in everything.
Why did you go to college? Because
a) it's your entry ticket to the big company HR department, and
b) the theory that they taught you will make you MUCH faster at coming up to speed and you'll beat the pants off almost all of those people who never bothered to get a degree.
Don't waste your time. Get the degree, get ANY job that gives you some practical work experience, then apply for a better job 1-2 years later. Finally, who do you know? This is the MOST important thing in getting work. Look for opportunities to build relationships with other professionals. IT is *always* a small world, and after a couple of years experience, your reputation will go a long way into finding your next position.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
When you ask a question like this on Slashdot you are going to obtain two answers. The people who invested massively in their education, grade etc will tell you that grades and education and going to a good school are critical. Those who learned to program themselves and worked their way up with little or no formal CS education will tell you that education is a waste of time leave school as soon as possible and enter the workforce.
Both are right. Depending on who you are, how you learn, how you set goals and work towards them either path may be fine or one path may work and the other would fail.
What advice I would give is that you should not look at this issue from the point of view of others success and failure but rather from what your heart and mind tells you. At that point ignore all pressure and advice from others and decide for yourself what course to take.
Even if it ends up being the wron answer at least you own the decision.
How can a piece of garage kill themselves if they are an inanimate object to begin with?
If everything else was equal, sure, I'd favor the higher grades (with or without repeating classes).
But assuming your grades are decent enough to get you an interview in the first place, I'd be MUCH more interested in your participation in the open-source project, as it's much more likely to be indicative of your actual work performance.
Some places won't even look at candidates without high GPAs (my company included), but if you show yourself to be a stud on a project with visibility then no one will really care about your GPA... or even your degree or school, really.
i'm speaking here as a grad school grad, interviewee, (inexperienced) interviewer, with a few years amongst different startups, and have switched jobs to get better pay and positions when things go horribly south. my experience sez: if you demonstrate you're motivated and want to dive into a new environment, and that you have done so successfully in the past, you will be viewed as a good hire. couple that with communication skills and a confidence about what you've done, and you're golden. a lot of the time it seems that job openings may attract at least a couple smart people that could _maybe_ stay focused enough to get the job done. however, what the hiring engineer really wants is someone whom they can get along with. this lets them know that the inevitable differences in coding and work style can be resolved positively and productively. because remember, you're going to be maintaining or writing new stuff within an existing framework and culture, so you need to be able to get along with your coworkers and bosses. ** this may only be valid for the startup realm. but they're fun! and you get a lot of responsibility and flexibility.
You, I, and Edsgar all have a right to our opinions. Just because Edsgar is famous doesn't mean I'm going to accept his unsupported statement any more than I'd accept yours or you should accept mine.
I work for a recruiting firm and I can definitely tell you that I'd would take a CS graduate with bad grades and 2 years of "real world" experience over somebody with a straight A (4.0) GPA and no experience. I would do it 100 times over and over. In fact, if you are looking for a job, send me an instant message and we can definitely talk about getting you placed somewhere.
.NET, etc.) and be able to determine the difference between recursion and for-loops. Those people (regardless of GPA) will continue to be employed and will maintain a high standard of living with a job they can enjoy because they can convert knowledge into wisdom through experience.
To give a personal experience/testimony, I graduated with a CS degree with a 2.0 GPA about 3 years ago but with about 3 years of solid full-time work experience. Most of my class mates had 3.0 or greater GPA's and no work experience. Almost all now have gone into different fields (fast-food restaurant management) because they couldn't hack it and couldn't apply education curriculum into the real world.
You do not know how frustrating it is to interview recent CS graduates with 3.0+ GPA's and not be able to give you the fundamentals of computing. Just simple questions like the difference between a binary tree or a linked list let alone anything regarding any object-oriented programming concepts. The truth of the matter is that the IT field right now is hot, not like it was hot during the dot-com boom where anybody that could spell "Webmaster" got a job. But it's hot for SKILLED workers. Somebody that can write compilable code, use object oriented programming languages (Java,
I've interviewed and made hiring decisions for 300+ people in the last few years for a Fortune 50. Be careful drawing too much advice from pure academics on real world companies and how they operate.
I don't care what school you attended, classes you took, or your grades (sorry to burst your bubble if they told you otherwise in school). In the absence of relevant work experience, I care about your major, whether you finished your degree, and any school work that _tightly_ relates to the job. Mainly, I care how well you perform on my interview questions/problems, your demeanor, and attitude. Of additional importance is how you convey your relevant experience and make the sale for how you can excel in the job.
Your answers to my questions tell me much more about you than your transcript can. Also, I always spend part of the interview drilling into what you tell me are your technical strengths to serve as a combined integrity and technical depth test.
The reasons for this approach are many, but mainly because I've seen community college drop-outs operate with higher effectiveness than MIT grads (of which I've hired a few). I don't want to lose out on a truly gifted person by giving undue weight to credentials. I need both short term and long term potential. A fancy school and high grades tell me a little about your long term potential, but doesn't tell me as much as you might think.
Good luck!
I wouldn't repeat the classes if I were you.
Employers
After you get your first job, the words 'Summa Cum Laude' are only for bragging rights. It MIGHT help you get recruited by a top company, but frankly I'm not so sure of that. I did menial IT work in college. While the experience wasn't the best, it helped when I got out. Employers were much more eager to hire a kid with some real work experience than someone with a 4.0 GPA and no experience.
Grad Schools
I doubt grad schools will overlook the fact you repeated classes (although I could be wrong). Many graduate school admission committees will look at your GPA in different ways. They'll examine you in-major GPA, your GPA for your final 2 years, etc. Secondly, most grad schools in CS look very highly on good grades in classes like Combinatorics, Algebra, Set Theory/Logic, Number Theory, (i.e. pure discrete math). If you really think your grades need a boost, try taking a couple of math classes and get a minor (or major) in math. Finally, good grades in a MS program or some research experience can easily draw attention away from those bad grades. Don't waste your time repeating classes, unless you really didn't understand the material (and you can proceed without it).
Other options (get an MS)
There are very reputable professional MS programs out there. If you don't get accepted anywhere you like, you can always take that money and go to grad school. Many good schools have room in professional programs for people who can pay.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
So, I think I can say I was in a fairly similar situation.
Here's what I found out. There's a small list of employers who at every stage in the career 'screen' candidates based on degrees. Not many, but some.
For the other 95% or so, your degree grade matters for your first job. They have no prior career history to refer to, so they have to take the degree as an indicator. After that, the important thing is experience, and relevant skills. My employers since, have been vaguely interested in the fact that I had a degree, but I'm very sure that if I had no degree at all, and the same experience, I'd have got the job anyway.
My first job, was started whilst at university. I carried on when I finished, and that experience was the bootstrap to my second job, where I stayed for 5 years.
However, I do also know a fair few people who have not been able to get that 'initial' offer, who also didn't graduate all that well.
My advice would be this. Check the job market. If you can find something 'career building', that are prepared to interview you, then don't bother repeating a year. Degree grades get you into the interview, actually getting the job depends on your skills, presentation, manner, and general competence. All else being equal, if you have trouble finding that career building job, then go and repeat, rather than working at 'time filler' dead end jobs.
If you choose to go with the lesser grades, one possible suggestion is that you try and score an internship with some company after you graduate, prove to them how good you are and then when your internship is near done, let them realize that you're going to find another job and you'll be out on the street. They might just make an exception to keep you on somehow if they really valued what you could do.
The reason why I mention this is because most companies don't want to necessarily hire people straight out of school because you have no experience (sure, open source is great, but it isn't always a disciplined environment). Once you've got some experience, only your skill set will really matter (and what insight you bring to the table with those skills).
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
My advice is if it's just 2-3 classes you need to re-take, them go for it. But beware of complacency. The "BORING, I've seen this before" attitude kicks in and you end up getting a C anyway.
Retaking a class can be a rewarding experience:
I dropped Differential Equations on the last day to drop at the end of my Sophomore year and re-took it the next semester. The two professors had very different viewpoints, the prof the first time was "Mr Math", a very theory POV and the second prof was "Mr Engineer", very "Here's what you need to know for your 300-400 level Engr classes" POV. At first, the second guy seemed like a breath of fresh air, but after a while I could see where he was cutting some corners and Mr Math's way was better.
To sum it up, I did learn a lot from taking Diff Eq (almost) twice.
Hopefully you won't have to re-buy the book (although the way most schools are, I'm guessing you will).
Despite what colleges tell you, where you get your degree and how well you do does not matter for 90% of the jobs out there. Where does it matter?
Any other job, for the most part, just checks that you graduated. Everything after your first job is based on how well you've done in previous jobs, and who you know.
So get out there and get to work, unless law school/med school or a teaching career is in your future.
Most employers hiring recent college grads have minimum HR barriers to get past, usually a GPA of 3.0 or higher. This also happens to be the baseline "minimum" GPA for a lot of part-time grad schools. If your GPA meets this minimum, then I say don't bother taking the courses again.
Of course, you can do a lot with mitigating factors, so long as you know how to talk it up with the interviewers. My GPA (BS ECE) is just slightly under that magic 3.0 barrier, but it hasn't stopped me from getting a good job, or entering grad school part-time. My key mitigating factor: I hated my "core" classes, and did terribly in them. I did significantly better the last three years of school, despite the harder classes.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I'd lead with the project and just leave everything else as resume filler.
Look at the other side: the [alleged] excessive involvement in the OSS project shows that the candidate has some genuine difficulty concentrating on the task at hand. It looks like he has trouble prioritizing appropriately.
(Yes, I know he was working a project, not playing games. However, the point stands.)
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
My advice based on years of professional consulting experience in IT would be to graduate with the BSc(CS), enroll in a reputable graduate degree programme via distance education while concurrently focusing on a career. Most employers, particularly should you decide to be a consultant/contractor rather than an employee, have little interest in grades. Proving you have the background and experience is much more important; the degree is merely a check box in the screening process. After years working in IT I finally decided, in 2004, to earn an undergraduate degree and will be graduating (GAP ~3.7/4.0) in December 2007 - all while working full-time.
Do not repeat any courses in hopes of raising your GPA. If you have at least a 3.0/4.0, then you can get into a graduate degree programme. In the event you GPA is lower than 3.0/4.0, then gaining professional experience will work in your favour if you ever decide to pursue a graduate degree down the road.
From what the profs at college have said to us, bad grades stay with you and will remain a negative sign regardless... in otherwords, don't get bad grades.
Both the old low grade and the new higher grade are shown on transcripts.
They were talking specifically about failing and retaking courses, but said that it applies somewhat to low passing grades as well.
Either way, if you are on the low side already, improvements are improvements.
It completely depends on your goals. If you just want to get a job and work then don't repeat. I've never had a single employer (I've had 4 now over 8 years) ask about grades. I've worked at a large company (5000+ employees worldwide, ok not huge but larger) a small company (about 30 employees), and 2 start ups. I personally love working at startups, exciting, edge of your seat, and you're generally making new stuff not maintaining some 15 year old app that is completely broken, but the company won't foot the bill to hire 3 decent programmers for 6 months to re-write it. YMMV, its just my personal feeling. Anyway, point being I've never had a single person ask about grades. In fact I've never had a single person ask me anything at all about school. Once you've got experience on your resume, that is pretty much all anyone looks at, I don't even have my schooling on my resume anymore, took it off last year, still got a new job in 2 days early this year. BTW, all my job changes were completely voluntary, never been laid off or fired (not even in 2000). And I've never been on a "job search" for more than 2 weeks.
If you want to go to grad school and do anything in academia, then you need those grades. That's all academics look at, its all they care about, well that and the GRE. I don't have any experience here... I disliked school, I got out as soon as I could, I'm not looking back.
I have a 2.7 GPA in computer science, heading into my final year. I have been working steadily the entire time, though. I honestly couldn't care less about GPA. As I have learned, it is only what you know and what you can do that counts. I have seen High School dropouts get some nice jobs, based on the fact that they are very good at programming or networking. I have seen college graduates start out on the help desk, because they honestly didn't know anything outside of what the book told them. As others have said, in the absence of any skills or work experience, a high GPA might make the difference but only on that first job. After that, it is all about what you know.
WOW
I am not going to lie, I'm tired of the professors, the HW, the studying, and the projects. I just want to get paid already.
Your NUTS if you go for another year 'just for grades' - life isn't just about grades, man. If you can show your future employer that you know what you are doing, are easy to get along with and work well with people - I say thats more than school will ever teach you.
I have to say - after my four years - I have learned more outside the classroom, than I have inside the classroom (not just about computer engineering, but about people and life in general). As long as you had a productive life the past fours years outside the classroom as much as you did inside the classroom, I'd say get a job - cause after your first job - the grades won't matter anymore. [ Sometimes today, for the bad or worse, Experience > Education ].
Good Luck !
| Microsoft gives you Windows. Linux gives you the whole house.
I spent little time looking at the education other than to see if they had the right skill set.
You may have spent little time, but you definitely ranked the candidates based on their school and GPA.
As an example, If you have two candidate resumes in front of you, one from a highly regarded school and one that is less well regarded, then the candidate from the highly regarded school with the same GPA gets ranked higher. This is a fact of life and is the *why* one goes to a well-regarded school.
OT Anecdote:
I made a horrible mistake of getting into a well-regarded school and leaving because it is a diploma factory. My fellow students had an offensive sense of entitlement and lived in some kind of fantasy world where the bank of Mom and Dad took care of everything. I got the education I wanted elsewhere and paid for it myself. I paid dearly however because the diploma mill grads took the jobs I wanted.
When I got a post-grad degree from a highly regarded school, career doors magically opened again.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
However, grad schools DO care about GPA. If you're ever planning to go back, it might be worth it to retake the classes.
This is something that a lot of people (including myself in the past) don't think about. If you ever want to go to grad school of any sort, GPA is IMPORTANT. Trust me -- applying to grad school with a GRE/LSAT/MCAT score in the upper 95% and a GPA way below the lower 25% for that school will not get you into a good grad school. (Having good relationships with your profs to get references is also vitally important and may be something else you're not thinking about as an undergrad.)
If you're sure that you're just going to enter the workforce and stay, then to heck with it -- GPA only matters for the first job. I've never even put GPA on my resume after getting my second job during while I was still in college. Afterwards, it's skills they want. However, make sure that's what you want. Things could change in ten years, and you might be regretting slacking off.
Not that I'm speaking from personal experience or anything...
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
If you plan on going for a Masters or PHD then yes go back and get better grades, it will increase your chance of acceptance. If not it probably won't matter.
My experience was/is similar to yours. I ended up graduating with a GPA of 2.56 after spending a couple of years on the Deans list. Working full time, taking a few years off in the middle, changing curriculums, and sick parents all took their toll (along with the perequisite partying in college).
First, I want to say, not a single employer has asked for my GPA at an interview. I'm not sure how typical this is, probably more so the more experience you have and the longer it has been since your graduation. In this regards I'm happy I didn't wait.
Second, It took me a year to find a real job (I graduated right as the internet bubble burst) so yeah I could of easily spent another year "repairing" my GPA. I then found out I would have been eligible for free tuition to the Grad school if my GPA had been a 2.6 (and I failed to find a job within a year of graduation). Which really bummed me out.
Lastly, the thing that I'm currently concerned about is I would like to go back and get my Master's in CS. Every job I have in the last few years has had tuition reimbursement of one sort or another. My only problem is almost every school requires a GPA of 3.0 (or 2.6 with probationary period). I've been told that several years of work experience will make up for the deficiency, but I've yet to see that in official form and I haven't applied to any schools yet to test the theory.
So ask yourself what do you want to do after school? What is important to you? can you afford to go to school for another year (your asking so I assume its an option). How long have you been there? Whats the job market like where you live? If its particularly 'hot' you might want to get a job and experience before things change. If its not, you probably have nothing to lose by going to school for another year (other than tuition and time).
"garage" - what the fuck? You're a stupid shit. The word is "garbage" you moron. That kind of error tells me that you don't read, ever. It's a typical error made by someone who is only accustomed to the spoken word. Therefore, you are swine. Since you don't read books and you're a fucking average piece of garbage, my advice to you is to go fucking kill yourself.
It's a vast and big world out there and some employers will care about the gpa and some will not. Do I think it's worth repeating a year to impress those employers who care about gpa? Absolutely not. If you rebound your final year, you can still have a respectable gpa. And what if you did repeat, something happens unexpected and you get c's again? It'll look worse for you. As another poster pointed out, save that year and money and redeem yourself in grad school for a year or 2 if you're that worried. A masters will work better for you than a decent gpa with only a bachelors.
Maybe things have changed since I graduated 6 years ago but for your first job you just want that, a job and a job where you can get your feet wet and gain the experience you need, because after that, as stated elsewhere, all businesses care about is that you did get a degree but much more important, you have real world experience. As preperation too don't expect your first job to be rosey. If you can find a great first job all the more power to you but there's a good chance it'll be a place that you won't like and the environment stinks but the experience will be invaluable(that's how my first job was like) where if you stick with it, it'll be a great platform to springboard your career.......
In general I have found that while grades don't really matter for getting a job other than the extremes. 4.0= awesome 2.0 or didn't finish = no job. Now where it does make a huge difference is in 3 or 4 years if you decide you want to go back to school on the company's dime to get a masters or better. Then you can run into problems getting into the program if you have 2.5 gpa. I graduated with a 2.49 and was just glad at that point to be done with the program. Recently I applied to go back for a masters program and I had to do a lot of talking and explaining and a little bit of begging to get in and then they put me on probation to begin with to see if I was going to make it. I did get in but there were a number of places that I just didn't have a chance because they had a hard cut off and just don't accept anyone under that mark. Some really only will look at you with a 3.0 or better. So if you are close to one of those marks then do it but also look at how much you can move your GPA in reality based on taking a few classes. Don't retake anything that has a b- or C+ because you would have to get A+ in it to really move your GPA. The ones that make the difference would be the Ds and C- and even then when you have 120 credits with a total posiable value of 480 grade points and you are only going to be able to gain 9 grade point per class at the most (assuming a d in the class) and 5 classes a semester you are looking at 45 points. that is about 9% of your total points you can gain. so the best you can hope for would be a .75 point bump to your gpa. But that really relies on alot of Ds and is probably more realisticaly a 4.5 point bump per class giving closer to a .2 point bump the the GPA... Might be better to just get out there and start making some money and save that money you have for something more useful.
YMMV, of course, but my own experience has been that the only company that even cared about my degree was my first post-college employer, and they didn't seem to care about my GPA (it was good - almost made honors - but they didn't even ask about my grades), just that I had a degree. They didn't seem to care that it was from a reasonably good school, either. The only thing that seemed to matter was that I had one. No employer after that has even seemed to care much whether I even had a degree or not, it was all about what I could do.
That isn't to say there weren't advertised jobs that specifically mentioned a degree; the funny thing is, no place that required a bachelor's degree ever called me, while almost every place that didn't say anything about degrees called, and almost all of those offered me a job. What do I draw from this? That places that don't place much emphasis on your degree have more clue than places that do. If what a prospective employer cares about is who you are and what you can do, it's much more likely to be a satisfying experience than if they're too hung up on the paper. Having direct experience as a hiring manager myself, I'm not likely to care much about the degree, or even if you have one, unless I'm looking for PHD-level candidates. Heck, the best programmer I ever hired had neither a degree nor formal training in CS. He was a self-taught natural, and I knew what I was looking at when I interviewed him. And he was young, too. If he'd gone to college he would've still been there instead of interviewing with me.
That said, what kind of company you're interested in is going to matter a lot in your decision. If you're looking to join a large, well-established company, they're more likely to care about your degree, and what your GPA was. If start-ups are what float your boat (that's where I've spent the last five years), they're much less likely to care about your GPA, or even your degree, b/c they're not using an HR buzzword formula to see whose resume even gets passed on to the hiring manager. However, if you get an interview, be prepared to code on the whiteboard, or they may hand you a laptop in the interview and ask you to do something there. That happened with my current job. One of my interviewers walked in with a laptop, sshed into one of the dev hosts and asked me to do some stuff.
So, if your goal is ${big_famous_company}, consider staying on for the extra time and boosting your grades. If small companies or startups are your interest, maybe just go for it.
One other thing to consider is the opportunity cost. Figure out roughly what you would make in your first two years out of college if you just go ahead and graduate with the grades you have. Then figure what you'd get if you stay in a year or two and get better grades. The opportunity cost is what you would make if you graduated now minus the add-on you would get if you stayed in for a year or two. In concrete terms, if your first job paid $35K right now and $37K in the second year, Vs. if you wait two years and get a job that pays $40K in the first year and $45K in the second, the opportunity cost is $72K - $13K = $59K.
I think the opportunity cost calculation is a pretty good metric, because no employer beyond your first post-college employer is likely to care about your grades at all, so whether you graduated with a C-average or Summa Cum Laude is unlikely to make much difference in your second job.
uni is a waste to start with, don't continue to folly by repeating a year. recuiters don't even look at your grades, just that you completed the course. your extra activities provide more insight into your skills then your grades.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I'm not a recruiter but here's my two cents.
In the end it's not how fast you got out of school or how high your grades are that is significant. What is significant is how much you have learned, and how you have exercised and developed your thinking and continued ability to keep on learning.
I think it's a good idea to stay and take your time and do it right.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Dude, stay in college as long as you can. Keep working on your open source project. Don't rush out to become a working stiff. Unless you're applying to grad school, GPA is overrated. As long as you have a degree, being able to demonstrate technical proficiency and a somewhat likeable personality are probably going to be the most important things.
Few companies care about your transcripts; they just care if you got a degree/diploma or not. No recruiter I know of requires transcripts (and I deal with a lot of them.) And don't forget; going back for a year is not a guaranty of higher grades. You could do worse, and then you've wasted time and money. The proof is in your actions... are you up on the trade? That is what will come through in interviews.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
- Graduated with a 3.2 GPA after repeating a year to get my grades back up.
- Graduated with a 2.7 GPA
If you have half a brain, your resume will look like the first of these two options:You write your resume, your college doesn't. Why the hell would you even mention that you repeated a year? Sure, there'll be a note on your transcript but here's a little secret: most companies fail to do their due dilligence background checks and those that do will likely confirm the GPA from the college without asking if there're marks about repeating years.
If they notice the degree taking longer - which is a huge clue in England where almost everyone studies full time but a total non issue in America where a lot of people take longer while working - simply tell them, "I took my degree a little slower while I worked on an open source project. Then distract them with more information about that.
You'll get fired down the line if you lie. If you selectively tell the truth, it's an embarrassing discovery if it comes up but almost certainly won't get you fired.
In my own career, I had a job that listed maybe a dozen skills. I had eleven of them, missing JSP which they'd made to sound pretty critical. I wrote them a response, listing how I'd used each of those eleven in my previous employment and was the perfect person for them. Sure, there was a missing twelfth paragraph but they never noticed it in the mass of positive responses. In the interview, whenever JSP came up, I talked all about my Java experience and delighted them. They gave me the job with a non-negotiable offer that turned out to be more than I was going to ask for anyway. A speed read of the O'Reilly JSP book and they ended up making me the team lead. I never once lied, there was never anything they could subsequently fire me for, but I certainly avoided any areas I didn't want to discuss.
So, for you, if you think the GPA will hold you back and you're happy to repeat, go do it. There's absolutely no reason to list the repeat on your resume. Sure, it's on your transcripts but you'll likely never have an employer scrutinize them in that much detail and, if you're any good as a salesman for yourself, you can always spin it as showing you're willing to go the extra mile to do the right thing.
I had a low GPA myself. I was almost a victim of the dot.com error, where tech talent = big bucks. I tried to balance the two while taking courses. My studies suffered, but I managed to graduate. When I was graduating I was with a company that I'd been with part time for 6 months, and I was well liked. That got me converted to full time and my employment was secure.
I've since worked at other places and explained my low GPA as a combination of that, and the fact tht I was learning technology beyond my course work. I learned PHP, then databases, all the while being self-taught. By the time I got to those courses that used those technologies, I was doing great, but the courses that were concurrent to my own learning are the cause of the low GPA.
Now I am in charge of a software engineering department. I do interviews. And let me tell you there is a sore lack of qualified candidates. Most are missing effective communication skills. Most can't present themselves adequately for the position. If you want to interview with me, leave it off. I'll ask you the questions that I think you need to have the answers to for the job. I also don't care I your arts/humanities credits dragged you down. Nail the interview, and you can make the GPA irrelevant.
That being said, if you can't present yourself as an incredible asset, repeat.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.