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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?"
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!"
The ugly truth is that people right out of college don't know much about the real world. (They always think they do, though, so I'm sure the average /. reader will argue with me on this. :-) ) Retaking the year and "knowing the material better" is a waste of time. You will learn much more by working in a real job for that same year than studying the same stuff again.
The GPA only matters in your first job search process--and that's only because no one can tell all of you recruits apart at that point. :-) Especially true at big companies that interview a lot of college kids at the same time. To me, hiring IT people at a steady but slow rate at a mid-size company, a very high GPA says you're brilliant, but all others from 3.5 on down basically all signify "not brilliant", which is fine. If you have mitigating factors like work exp or financial difficulties, you'll be able to explain your situation if anyone asks. Do not volunteer your GPA or attach your transcript to every letter.
Once you have a job on your resume, I start to have things I can react to as a hiring manager looking for certain things. So think of this first job as "the job that will get you the job you want," not "the job you want" and it will help your mentality in the search a lot.
Hope that helps...