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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.
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.
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 would agree with this; for most professions, grades really won't matter. The variance in grades from different schools is just too high.
Another piece of advice I would give is to not whine and make excuses for your bad marks. Financial reasons, full-time job, working on an open source project, drinking and partying every night, blah blah an employer won't give a damn about. You are responsible for your grades, plain and simple.
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.
At the bottom of the
graduates last in his class at medical school?
Doctor. :-)
I am not a recruiter, but speaking from personal experience, it appears grades make a huge difference. I have a really high gpa from a reputable school. When I go to career fairs the recruiters are signing me up for interviews the second they see GPA at the top of my resume.
I've had conversations go from the recruiter looking bored and distracted, then they look at my resume, see the GPA (and often comment on it) then suddenly they take a great interest in me.
Maybe you can't raise the GPA enough to really make an impact by changing a few Cs to Bs, but a top GPA has immediatly opened doors in my experience.
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
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...
"Many large companies do X" and "Many large companies do not X" can both be true at the same time.
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.
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
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.
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
I agree with this, but I would even take it further. All you really need for an interview is to have a degree, once you are in the interview your skill and personality will get you the job.
I have crappy grades (a couple of fails in there) and in my first interview I was asked about them and I told the engineers straight up that I was distracted that year and didn't put in the effort that I should have. Then I explained that I had worked hard on the last year and my results proved that. Grades were the topic of the interview for less than a minute, then it was all about what I knew.
Also, to the people saying that you may not know the material well enough all I can say is that as a graduate you know nothing anyway. 80/90% of what I know and use now as an engineer (working for some of the biggest companies in the world) was learnt on the job. If they focus too much on grades they are doing themselves a disservice. The best programmer I know has a fucking Accounting degree!
Dammit! I had a good one.
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"
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.
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.
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 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.
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...
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