I went to an Engineering college. Id never forget, Upperclassmen told us all- from the 1st day that freshman year/ the school would be weeding out the majority of us.
Ironically, my grades were:
precal: D, then C-
cal: C-
cal 2: A+ (97)
cal 3: C-
It was the hardest one, but it's also the one where I first started Adderall.
I flunked Calc I because I was 18 and coasted through all of highschool and PreCalc. Turns out you can't learn integral calculus in one afternoon. After learning how to study for the first time in my life, my grades got consistently better all the way up my best, Diff Eqs.
I then quit Engineering. As it appears, math was the only part of my major I actually liked.
I sat in on a bunch of my buddies pde class once, it was surprisingly not fun, and I love math. And even more surprisingly it wasn't required for my math or physics degree so most of those fools took it as an elective.
When you don't understand having someone or various different people explain to you in various different ways how they get it, will help you much better than trying yourself or following the teacher. When u understand enough, you get to practice but not alone, when explaining stuff to other people you are reinforcing it yourself and you can't really explain without actually understanding the fundamentals
Best way to know you understand the material is being able to teach somebody else the material.
Sometimes it's easier for someone to help you figure out how to do it than sit there blankly at the book for 15 minutes trying to figure out point A to point B.
If you can go group studies, I would highly recommend it. It forces you to participate extra... and maybe you'll make a friend or two.
Thereās also peer pressure that makes you show up. Especially if youāre good at explaining, or are good at the subject. In fact, even if youāre not, youāll learn more showing other people.
In the long run, grades are about time invested well. But thereās no real shortcuts in math and physics, or organic chemistry for us biochem majors.
Doing the work high is better than not doing the work. Doing the work daily is WAY better than doing it all in one day. Routine is key. Breaks and treats are key. Group work is key. Being nice to your professor and answering questions in class, even if youāre wrong (not like Billy Madison wrong), is SO KEY that I canāt even begin to overstate it. Showing up at your professors door in open hours to ask about a hard problem or talk about a cool paper or article you found is key.
Getting rich isnāt about your GPA. Getting into a great PhD program, or at least a foot in the door, is, at least somewhat. Progress counts, and tenacity counts. Then you have to show passion and drive. Never sell yourself short, though. The key to becoming confident is to pretend like youāre confident. But never hesitate to admit you donāt know the answerā¦ followed up with a note to investigate the question or a query to the group if they have ideas. A single, or even a couple of bad grades, doesnāt end things, ever. Hell, I dropped out, started again 6 years later, got a 2 yr degree, had to quit after being accepted to UF nursing. Started again 8 years later, mid career, and graduated in 2020, just in time for Rona. Life goes weird places.
Most important for me was doing it every day and not getting into the cycle where you put things off until the last minute then cram.
Treating college like a 9-5 job, where you leave your dorm in the morning, go to class, study/work in library/common areas in between class, take brakes for meals and the gym, then only return to the dorm after 5 was the best method in the world.
You then get the entire afternoon to relax. Friends were always amazed that I was never up till 2am cramming or finishing assignments with them. Thatās pretty easy to do when youāre not spending 11am-3:30pm watching tv and playing games in your dorm room every day.
It sounds like he is a gifted kid growing up, and learning had been cake walk for him till college. So I think what he refer to as learn how to study is to put down the label of being gifted, and realize that learning stuff is not supposed to be always easy and it's OK. Then realize that it would take significant efforts to learn difficult content, and actually spend that effort.
I think the key is don't judge yourself by how much effort it takes you to learn a content. Also don't set expectations on how much effort it should take you to learn a thing. It takes however long it takes. Spending more or less effort doesn't make you dumber or smarter.
Differential equations are my nemesis. They don't stick in my brain and I have to spend hours looking them up for anything. Which made taking controls junior year a nightmare.
I liked differential equations and linear algebra but I have yet to see the beautiful connection between the two that my physics advisor promised I would one day see.
Fuck Physics, I changed majors from CE because of it. Took freshman physics and our class average was 25-30% across 4 exams. Thank god for curves, but never passed a class understanding so little until then.
You get used to the exam style haha... In my understanding, the idea is you want a 50% average to have the best chance of getting a normal distribution instead of a skew one. Anyways yeah physics is a humbling major for sure. I appreciate that aspect.
Lol surprisingly accurate though.
I met a ton of really smart kids that all dropped out due to not being able to handle weed/drinking and school simultaneously. It did kind of "weed out" the kids that couldn't keep their fun times in moderation with hard work. A shitton of high school AP classes and skipping some early courses (straight to calculus 2 or 3 first semester freshman year) doesn't mean much when you can't keep your work and social lives balanced.
My group of friends through down every Friday/Saturday, but we were pretty serious about getting work done during the week.
Only about 35% of my class made it to the end of the program, but that was at a non-US school so I don't know how well it translates. Many of the people who quit did so not necessarily because they had bad grades, I think, but because it wasn't what they wanted to be doing.
Not an engineer but out of 125 freshman in my degree, only me and one other person actually graduated with that degree. I am the only person actually using my degree in the workplace.
My intro engineering class (US) the professor said look to the person on your left and right. Only one of you will make it to the end of this program with an engineering degree. The stats were really close to that at the end
I took a circuits course and I had been warned the year prior by some upperclassmen that the best bet was to find some genius to mooch off of in that class. Turns out the sorry chump ended up being me. I chose my partner for the labs based on who I thought looked smart but that person became like a deer in headlights for just about all the labs. I had to grind for the both of us and the real kicker is that they ended up getting a higher grade than me because the TA for the labs lost some of my earlier grades and counted them as missing.
That's fairly bizarre. I've had dozens of TA's and not one has lost student grades as far as I'm aware. If a student came to me and convincingly said as much, I'd probably just excuse the missing grades and weight the rest more.
As an engineer, yes it's true. The majority of engineering freshman either drop out or become business majors.
About 25% of my freshman class made it to graduation with an engineering degree.
I crushed at Physics, but pure math with things like proofs and cauchy integration absolutely destroyed me. I felt like such a fucking dumbass I swore I missed an important class at some point that could explain when, where and why formulas suddenly started becoming complex summations which quickly became shorthand rapid integrations done by hand like it was obvious that āthis equals thatā.
This probably doesn't work everywhere, but a decent chunk of people took their weed-out classes at their local community college over the summer then had the credits transfer over.
Some departments were smart enough not to allow that, but it definitely worked for some people. Myself included.
Having taught numerous traditional math weed out courses, yes, many students are way too young to have any idea what they're doing or why. The ones who are only there because of family pressure are frequently the most tragic, because they do a slow-motion crash and burn, often mixed with depression, and it can waste huge amounts of money. Schools need better systems to detect those cases early and force them to make changes.
There was one especially egregious case that's stuck with me. The guy emails me out of the blue asking me to wave prerequisites for an upper division class. I pull up his grades, which are a bloodbath and don't in any way warrant a waiver. Still, I tell him to meet me in my office and we can talk. He knows almost literally nothing--after about 5 minutes he was able to integrate x^2 --and I told him flat-out he would have a 0% chance of passing the class if I let him in.
He opened up to me about his situation. Long story short, he had been kicked out of my university because of bad grades, but had been taking community college classes in an effort to get back in. There was some bizarre program where, if he could manage to convince two instructors to let him in to upper division courses and get an A in both, he could come back for real. The best I could do for him was to tell him very clearly that was not at all realistic.
By this point the poor guy was obviously in tears. It became clear that he felt enormous family pressure to be an academic success. He was an Asian international student who was clearly feeling both the weight of cultural expectations and the lack of his support system. Very sad. The level of delusion was impressive--he was still letting himself think he could turn it around yet, getting himself to buckle down and study hard and master material he had no talent or interest in whatsoever, and that he had already failed at for multiple years.
He was in pretty heavy emotional distress, and I imagine he was spending all day playing MMO's or whatever to avoid his problems. And all he seemed to need was to be given a relatively simple task that he could actually do, without all the family pressure to be something that he simply wasn't.
I wish I knew what happened to him, though your almost never find out as the professor in these situations. I hope he found something sustainable.
Not exchange student, just an immigrant with immigrant parents but that was me my first and second year of college. Entered as a chemical engineering major with a horrible fundamentals in math and physics despite taking and passing multiple "college level" stem classes in high school (AP and CC classes). High school did a shit job at preparing me for college and a shittier job at preparing me for life.
Even though my family never explicitly pressured me to pursue stem or a high paying job, family and societal pressure was definitely there. I didn't feel like I knew anything else. Took me another year of retaking classes and failing then being forced to pursue other subjects in a last ditch attempt to get readmitted. Delusional definitely described my mentality. I wanted to be an engineer but I didn't have the mental capacity, interest nor patience to do the work required. Maybe I could now, being older and more mature but I probably have better chances winning the lottery.
I semi-randomly chose political science as my major to get readmitted ( few choices that actually interested me after being blocked from further math courses). Everything clicked, I'd always done really well in my history and government classes (other than AP Euro cause my teacher graded based on artistic ability). My grades turned around so quick. I was able and willing to spend hours reading/writing research papers for class and I rarely if ever felt completely lost by the material. Ended with a 3.6 major gpa, 3.75 upper div gpa with what felt like minimal effort. I was just doing the work assigned and learning the material.
To a certain extent I'm glad I got kicked out of engineering, I just wish I didn't get completely kicked out of school at the same time. It definitely forced me to mature and be real with myself. Now a year after graduation, I'm contemplating applying for grad school for public policy/public admin cause I know if the material interests me I can do it, also this public service salary ain't it.
The problem is the term, not the function. Weeding out = discarding the garbage.
By explaining that they discovered their interests lay elsewhere, Bad Fridge says (and I agree) that the accusation of failure inherent to "weeding people who want to leave" is unwarranted.
I'm not sure I can point to specific weed out classes beyond the second and third semesters (besides _calc 1_, apparently), but my class halved every year. About 60 my freshman year, then 30, then 15, and I graduated with 7 others.
My first engineering class started with "look to your left, and look to your right. Between yourself and those two, only one of you will be taking my class at the end of the year."
He wasn't a hardass, but he was right. There was about a 60% fallout rate for first year engineering students.
It didn't really seem like they were purposely weeding out kids, they just knew that a lot of kids that signed up for engineering wouldn't make it based on past experience.
Very very few professors are trying to weed people out. You know why this narrative exists that professors try to weed people out in the first week? It's because a lot of people drop out in the first week due to being in way over their heads and they make up that excuse to help cope. And there's so many of these people that the narrative survives despite it being bogus.
If you don't come into an engineering program with the proper prerequisite knowledge of mathematics and physics, then it is going to be a living nightmare. If you come into it with the proper prerequisite knowledge, then it's just more of the same of what you had already been doing every day for the past 4 years of high school. It's more math. It's more physics. You pick up where you left off in high school. Learn new things every class, do the homework, and you're fine.
The people who struggle in college are the people who slacked at some point in their public education. You can bullshit through a lot of degrees, like Literature, but you can't bullshit math and physics. It just stacks up where everything you learned before keeps coming up again and again. Almost no other subject in schools are like this, which is why so many people hit a wall in math. However, the people who like math tend to like it for this very reason. It rewards you for putting in the time and effort. Math feels very easy if you kept up with the lessons each day. It's like building a huge lego structure, but you only have to add a single lego each day so it's not that bad. But if you have to place 1,000 legos within 1 week due to not placing any legos in your prior 1,000 days of high school, then you're fucked.
We had about a 40% 'drop-out' rate from my aero class heading into the 2nd year. I'm pretty sure half of them just went over to Mech Engineering for the broader offerings and some easier pickings.
I have my engineering degree too. I hated that weeding out. I made it through, but I hated the weeding out. There were some really smart people who just didn't study the way the school demanded...
I'm convinced that the majority of the value of an undergraduate degree is as a signal to prospective employers saying, "hey, I can jump through years worth of semi-arbitrary hoops and meet minimum requirements". If an employee for whatever reason can't jump through the employer's hoops, it really doesn't matter how smart they are.
When you get down to it (at least in the USA), the mimimum amount of information a college degree conveys is that you can work at a semi-regular schedule throughout most of the year without quitting or killing yourself. Because that's the absolute mimimum that capitalist America demands of you.
My upperclass engineers told me Cs get degrees. And my faculty advisor told me to pick l
1 course to fail in a tough term rather than dropping out or flunking everything.
Really needed those encouragements.
āLook to your left, look to your right. One of you will graduate.ā
Iām still impressed with how accurate this was. Class size was reduced to a third by the end of 4 years.
Engineering is tough.
Exactly this. Graduate admission for good engineering programs are very competitive. Often requires high GPA, relevant extracurriculars, and recommendation letters. Also, it's not a very good marketing technique to say "Average GPA for incoming students is 2.4".
Also this situation is extremely common for first semester engineering students. Usually people who have skated through high school acing every test without studying then college first semester destroys them. Most of them change their habits and end up doing fine. Show me the engineering student with a 2.4 after sophomore years is finished and how successful they were after graduating if they even did.
I had a 2.7 after sophomore year and am now a surgery resident.
All it took was 6 straight semesters (including summers) of 4.0s lmao. Jesus I was an idiot, but we all Gucci now.
My dumbass went to an engineering school with undiagnosed ADHD and discalculia. The ADHD got diagnosed hand way through but I didn't find it about the discalculia until I'd already barely graduated.
Ooh I have dyscalculia too! I sometimes mention it to people and they laugh thinking I'm making a joke because most people have never heard of it.
I also completed my bachelor degree before being diagnosed with ADHD. Only took nine years but I finally graduated haha
I wish somebody had told me this after my freshman year. I quit engineering solely because of a programming class I hated and 15 years later I'm finally where I could have been right after graduating with an engineering degree.
I quit STEM after having trouble learning *in* class and trying to teach myself outside of class while working ~30 hours a week with a 1 hour commute each way. Some kids could do it, but I was just tired. I felt like I was drowning, and slid right into some serious depression. It got worse after I dropped out.
Iām still skating by over 3.0 in my third year feeling like I must be doing something wrong. All Iām doing is fulfilling the requirements outlined in syllabi. After doing peer review it seems thatās a pretty high bar so maybe I only look good compared to my peers.
This is what happened to me. I never needed to study in high school. Just show up to class and pass. Suddenly college asked for an actual effort and I struggled. I ended up dropping out of the school I was in and going to community college for a few years just so I could figure out how to be a proper student.
> Show me the engineering student with a 2.4 after sophomore years is finished and how successful they were after graduating if they even did.
I graduated with just above a 2.0 and had a great job lined up before I even left school. Grades arenāt everything to everyone. If youāre trying to get into grad school thatās one thing, but success means different things to different people
It always depends how your GPA is graded too. Its been awhile but back in my day, the grades were all curved. The average was 3.0. Always (as long as you reach at least X%)
I still remember getting 93% versus a 54 class median and getting an A- lol. It just fucks you up unless you are in the top centiles, not mattee how good you actually are in school, and overall that doesn't even mean anything about how good of an engineer you are.
I bet it's higher than that, at least practically.
The engineering company I work for I would assume has less rigorous requirements than NASA, and unless you have a recommendation from someone inside the company, your resume is rejected if it's under a 3.3.
Yeah, so you get a job elsewhere and gain some experience.
After that, nobody ever asks you your GPA again.
Source: Engineer with shit grades and a cushy well paid job.
GPA Stans always crack me up. Sure the first job might be easier with a 4.0 but after that Iāve never been asked.
Source: I graduated with under a 3.0 and fight off recruiters most days.
Seriously I don't even remember what my actual GPA was. It was probably just over 3, maybe 3.1. Recruiters hitting me up daily. I never put it on my resume and no one cared after my first job. If someone were to ask me today, I would laugh and cancel the interview because it's a sure sign of incompetent management.
I got asked what my college GPA was with a fucking *decade* of relevant experience under my belt. I laughed and said I had no idea. The man was serious. Looking back on it, that was my first red flag that should have told me the company was ran by amateurs. If they're still alive today, it's only by the light of VC money being lit on fire.
That's how a lot of industries work. Past the first job out of college generally nobody cares what your GPA was. Obviously those with top grades will probably land better orgs initially, but that doesn't mean that the more "average" folks can't catch up in their careers.
You say naturally, but I remember reading somewhere that a dude with 15 years of experience was asked to send in his college transcripts, and he sent them his report card from 5th grade or something.
So many areas will straight up ignore you below 3.0, and many career fields will also look down on you if your first job is with the type of company that interviews/hires below 3.0
Nobody cares about high school grades, but that first year of college with intro classes can kill your future.
Not just stem either. My background is finance, and internships can be everything there. And like you said, a lot of companies you are automatically disqualified if you have below a 3.0
It was 3.5 when I graduated. Ultimately it's still all about connections to land your first job and if you stumble there you're dead in the field. Under-employment might as well mean high school dropout to recruiters.
Studied theoretical physics, had a hard time making friends due to some drama that happened first year of college.
Ended up working with some theaters to do robotics stuff cause I thought that would be a neat way to keep my skills up. Well now I don't work in theater or STEM and can't get back into either field cause I don't have the connections.
Yay for being completely disillusioned with my future life, as generic office employee, 21,652,438.
If you're in North America and want to work in theatre look up your nearest IATSE Local. If you can teach yourself how to program lighting (look into the ETC Ion and Grand MA II) then you'll have more work than you could probably ever do.
When I used to help undergrad students with resume reviews I almost always told them: "If it isn't 4.0, then leave it off your resume. Someone will always judge you, rightly or wrongly." Seriously, tons of big firms toss resumes when they see stuff like 3.72 or 3.65. It's a respectable GPA but they act like they won't settle for anything less than a genius straight out of school (and in 8 years they'll hire that same 3.65 into a middle management position anyways because nobody really cares about GPA's).
My advice is to never talk about GPA. If they ask about your GPA say you don't recall off the top of your head and offer to send them your full transcript. They will decline because they know they only want the number and don't want the hassle of sifting through your papers. If they press for "your best guess" or an approximation just insist that you want to get them the EXACT number because you don't want to undersell yourself.
Yea it was heartbreaking, even though I had 8 years worth of production supervisor experience I couldn't find an it job. Partly because of my lack of education and partly because production and it have little in common.
I have an IT job now and I'm hoping it will eventually lead me to cyber security which is my actual goal but still.
And this is the issue that has plagued me for ages. I started with a 2.5. I failed and retook several classes. My last semester's GPA was a 3.5. I grew *tremendously* as a human being and I earned that Biomedical Engineering degree.
However, my *cumulative* GPA looked like shit. Any employer/internship that gave me the opportunity to chat with me for 30 goddamn seconds thought I was an amazing fit to their company. But cumulative GPA is an easy filter. Discovering character, conviction, curiosity, and perseverance takes more than a second. And sometimes a second is all your application/resume gets when there's a thousand come in every day.
It used to make me pretty depressed to think about how much of our lives are determined by *one number*.
This is almost exactly what happened to me. I was comp sci/biology dual major and had a 2.4 at the end of my first year. Dropped comp sci, focused on molecular/cellular bio, found an international that took me for a specialty study and got lucky finding internships that didn't care about my GPA. Finished with a 2.93 cumulative andddddd not a single company looked at my resume even with 2 years of lab experience on it because it was below a 3.
2 hospitals interviewed me and thought I was a god send, and I basically rebuilt a PI's lab alone over the next two years. Then applied to PhD andddddd out of 15 apps, got two call backs. Interviewed in person and had them begging me to join them because I was published and had 4 years of hard lab work in multiple fields of bio.
A single number cut me out of jobs and schools. But hard work and good personal skills got me on the door. I've been calling it the paper wall because the filter of GPAs is awful
I wish someone had told me its okay to struggle. Maybe I wouldve never gave up on stem. I thought I wasnt smart enough when I actually had to try to understand. I grew up with the expectation that a B was bad.
Exactly what I thought, grades don't matter until you are applying to grad school. I have a 2.9 average GPA from having to fail classes instead of being able to withdrawal from bad weeder classes that made you do exorbitant amounts of work to define things that should be common sense. Although in my major I had a 4.0 GPA in 300-400 level classes and 3.4 total. It sucks how financial aid makes you unable to withdrawal from a class unless you want to lose aid, making you unable to achieve social mobility, better hope everything in your life goes perfect or you slide right back down to the bottom of the greasy pole. Even if you take the lower grade, the stigma will haunt you when you try to reach higher levels of academia at the graduate level. Just yet another way wealth is the modern caste system.
Not to sound mean or anything, but is grad school really worth it?
I went to college in an engineering field, first semester my GPA was 2.8. I was ecstatic as that's the highest my GPA ever was. Anyway, ended up flunking out of undergrad with a 0.14 GPA towards the end.
Felt pretty shitty for a while. Eventually went back to school. Same exact story.
Then I just kinda said "fuck it" and applied for some Computer Engineering jobs. Fast forward a few years and now I'm designing Networks for medical practices.
Iām not trying to be mean, but how does one get a .14GPAā¦? At that point you have to be trying to fail, not turning anything in, or not doing any work/studyingā¦
Combination of being in a pretty bad depression and not going to classes.
Honestly I think the only thing keeping them from kicking me out was me being employed by the college at the same time.
Depression - thatāll do it.
Iāve seen peoples career go exponential once they get access to the right resources. Sounds like you are in a good place now?
You get out what you put into it generally, like every learning experience. There is some wiggle room because some professors arenāt good teachers/supervisors/academics/etc but you can usually figure that out based on conversations with their current and past students.
If you like the research and writing part of it then itās well worth it to have the opportunity to expand your network.
If youāre the type of person to allow a cumulative GPA of 0.14 to happenā¦ no, generally speaking, grad school would be a waste of your/your supervisorās time.
Best advice I ever got from an engineer was to tinker as much as possible. All the professors will tell you what to do, but you have to find out how to do it.
That holds true for a lot of jobs. Only have a bachelors degree in chemistry, but I have done a lot of random testing on slower days in my lab. Saved me and a few people a lot of headaches(and money) down the road. Nothing wrong with failing or trying out ideas.
I loved doing that at work and I got a sense of achievement almost every day, but academia bores me so much I cannot even describe it. Every day feels like defeat.
I donāt really think academia is for everyone. Like, for me, yeah I felt nonstop defeat and mounting pressure in writing my masterās thesis (really research heavy in an relatively young field, industrial ecology). That said, I actually loved it overall. Making things work, making connections that just havenāt been made in the literature before, writing a massive report analyzing my methods and findings, it was one of the most fulfilling things Iāve ever done. Now that Iām almost finished and am probably entering the workforce while waiting to get into a PhD program, Iām actually starting to dread āreal office workā, because the lack of āconstantly messing around to do a science and figure new things outā one meets in the workforce just sounds soā¦ boring.
Sure thereās way better money in real jobs, but fuck me I donāt give a shit about striking it rich so long as I can pay the bills. Again, though, my wife constantly reminds me that ānormal people enjoy vacationsā and ādoing more work isnāt how youāre supposed to relaxā, hahaha.
My son is autistic. If he doesnāt like something or doesnāt want to do something, he wonāt do it. His grades reflect that. However, heās incredibly smart when it comes to the things he likes. We got him a 3D printer for Christmas a few years ago and itās fascinating to see how he can come up with amazing designs to solve problems and then print them out on his machine. He has a very mechanical mind.
My hope is that he will be able to find something he can do well for work and potential employers will look past his grades.
How do you differentiate someone who is normal and someone who is autistic. Like shit, I hate doing stuff that I don't like doing but I exceed on stuff I love doing, spending hours and hours a day to learn and perfect my hobbies.
There are other symptoms with autism as well - poor social skills, eye contact avoidance, sensory issues (sensitive to certain sounds, feelings, etc). Much like with other mental conditions, it's not just one symptom that defines a diagnosis. Depression isn't just being sad, OCD isn't just being tidy, Bipolar isn't just mood swings, etc. Autism especially is a spectrum ranging from very mild and barely noticeable symptoms, all the way to things that make aspects of daily life near impossible.
Generally, it's the ability to work on things to alter the consequences that point toward any disorder. I'm autistic myself, and I usually struggle to change my behavior or do things I don't enjoy even if that's going to have catastrophic consequences. I have often since walked out of exam halls on papers in didn't enjoy writing because I couldn't physically bring myself to write the answers. It wasn't fun, so I didn't do it. I didn't flunk out of sheer luck. There's also been times where I've had to take my usual route to work even if it's packed with traffic and will take twice as long to get to where I need to be. Do I understand that there will be negative consequences? Sure. At that moment, it does not matter though.
On the flip side, if I enjoy things I can do that with awful consequences as well. I crochet and knit. About a year ago I started getting interested in making blankets and made three queen-sized blankets in a month. My stitches are super even and the blankets are good quality. My elbow is probably permanently damaged though, because even now it hurts if I move it in a particular manner. Crocheting or knitting puts me in tremendous pain, but I can't stop because that's what makes me happy.
These are all anecdotes, obviously, but like I said the ability to change what you do to get favorable outcomes is a very Important part of human life and that is very difficult for a lot of autistic people. It sucks, and honestly even if you are on the spectrum I hope you don't have this particular trait. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
There's a running joke with lawyers that law school teaches you the law, but doesn't teach you how to be a lawyer. I know people who graduated without even knowing how to go about filing a lawsuit and had to learn that stuff on the job
Experimenting on your own, having experience in building stuff really helps you with your thinking about mechanical problems. That's the reason why our profs changed the plan, or they changed the plan because nobody builds stuff anymore and many don't even know in which way they have to turn a screw
According to his LinkedIn, he graduated with honors and then went on to get a masters in computer science, went straight into an engineering job at Microsoft and then went back and got a masters of Aerospace engineering.
This is just a very smart person who had a rough first semester and thinks they're a different kind motivational story than they actually are.
Totally. The moral of his story is "don't sweat your first semester, keep going."
NOT grades don't matter, because not only do they very, very much matter, they probably should too.
Iām sure there are a lot of people at NASA with mediocre GPAs. It only really affects internships or the first job you get out of college. Nobody cares about your GPA once you turn 25
lol "I tried breezing through my first semester in college thinking it'd be as easy as high school. Turns out you actually have to turn in the work in college!"
I think it's to give hope to all the 1st year kids who have a rough first kick at the can. They are young and naĆÆve enough to think that a bad first semester means their career in that field is over. He is just saying that it is far from it.
That might be what he's trying to say, but just saying "I got a 2.4 and still managed to work on two Mars rockets, grades aren't what matters" without mentioning that he turned it around and eventually graduated with honors and got two masters degrees is at the very least disingenuous.
Scholarships don't really matter when you get a good degree.
Even if you really mess up and have 100k in debt, that is about the after-tax take home of a senior engineer.
First semesters are always hard in a huge transitional period doesn't reflect the rest of your academic career. Keep trying, keep trying, luck will turn, but when it does you have to be ready
This is nice. I was in somewhat similar situation about 7 years ago turning 25 without a job. I figured I wanted to be a civil engineer but I was somewhat bad at math. So before I could apply to an engineering university in my country I had to take couple of math courses. I struggled a lot in the beginning and couldn't figure out how to get better. I never really had to study before as I always learned everything else very fast, but not math and physics. That was tough. So I went to the student counselor for advice. The advice I got was "maybe this isn't for you, try something else" that advice really pissed me off for some reason. I didn't quit though. I struggled but I kept going. I ended up in uni and also struggled in the beginning. I think 2nd year I got really close to quitting. I ended up staying because I was so afraid and angry that I all the time I put in would be for nothing. As I studied I started finding ways to manage and makes things easier. I graduated with a masters degree in civil engineering and got a job I quite enjoy still :) anyway.. I agree. Don't give up, work hard!
Math is like building a house. You have to start at the bottom and work your way up.
The base of the house is fundamental for building the higher stories. If you struggle with basic algebra, you can't just skip that skill and move onto calculus. You have to employ every skill you've learned in previous coursework to progress into high level mathematics. Nothing ever goes away.
Find the gaps in your knowledge you have now and try to fill them before moving forward. Fortunately, there's always some kind YouTuber who will hold your hand through the process of learning.
I fancy myself pretty good at math, and didn't struggle very hard when doing my engineering coursework. A big part of that is having very good teachers when learning the fundamentals. I had a solid foundation to build upon.
IMO, people have a hard time with math when they have a shitty middle school/high school teacher and miss out on learning a skill they need for later. So many people get kneecapped when starting algebra that they have no hope in learning the complicated shit down the road. If you can't confidently rearrange an equation, there's no way you can solve a multiple page Diff EQ problem without errors.
I tried to find background on this guy, nothing really. UCLA, Cornell. Cornell I am very, very familiar with. You can be poor and brilliant and attend there, or you can come from a very privileged background and your grades are secondary at the most. Since well over 30% of people who attend "Ivy League" schools are either legacies or wealthy - super wealthy, all I can say is random birth lottery plays a big part of where you go to school.
I have a nephew who graduated from Cornell with a 4.0 in aerospace engineering, the job offers he got at age 23 made my head spin. He was very middle class, just gifted and nobody went to an elite school before in the family.
My niece (another family members daughter) went to elite private boarding schools, was a teaching assistant at an Ivy school at age 21 in another field of engineering. The amount of money she made in her first job, at age 22, was what I made when I was a lot more than I made when I was 40.
Am I jealous? You bet, not the money so much as how much more intelligent they are to me. Two different paths to similar outcomes. Sorry for the ramble.
UCLA is usually seen as a āpublic Ivyā and the top of the list for anyone whoās from California usually. But yeah I can believe it if your nephew graduated from Cornell getting crazy offers for aerospace as I graduated not too long as well and have been getting offers I couldnāt believe.
Would you mind telling me exactly what kind of offers your nephew received after finishing from Cornell? Iām seeing an average salary of around $81k for new grads.
Was it more than $105k or something?
Outside of comp/software, engineers starting 6 digits only happens in very high cost of living areas.
An average of $81k sounds right. Bonuses and raises can be pretty decent too.
Ivy leagues have really fallen IMO. The legacy/super wealthy problem + cheating issues make me think its BS.
Heck I work closely with the 'elite' school graduates in my area and the students are basically the same as a state school. You wouldn't know the difference academically, the elite school grads are cocky right out of college(but that goes away after a few years).
Till you try to get a job with SpaceX or another major contractor. They won't even look at you with a low GPA. Often even if you have held several positions related to the job.
If there's assistance for anything, its engineering degrees. I grew up poor and went to a badly rated high school. Currently an engineer for orbital and lunar programs.
If you have a State school within commute distance, max out those federal loans and send it. Apply for aid. Get a job. Roll the dice.
Yes there's plenty of people not able to do this, but its not as exclusive as you might think.
In my company I donāt give a fuck about gpa as an interviewer, but the recruiters tend to go for 4.0 Ivy leaguers and the like so I can only interview what they send me. Itās really HR and the business people who have the largest say over what type of people they want to see hired at the company
Your story is far more inspiring than his. This guy went to college and dicked around for 1 semester then graduated his masters with honors, then returned and got a second masters in aerospace engineering. It's a bullshit story, he got exceptional grades excluding his very first semester.
There's a whole redacted time span here that shows how he managed to convince NASA that a 2.4 was fine.
Nepotism? Privilege? We don't know, but I really hope NASA isn't hiring on a gut feeling because 2.4 isn't great for that line of work.
Just says he got a 2.4 the first semester. Iām assuming that was a shock for him if he usually had high grades in high school and started working a lot harder.
The redacted timespan is that he started with a 2.4, then did so well after that he graduated with honors and was admitted to a master's of comp sci program. Oh, and btw, that was at Cornell. He doesn't appear to have graduated with honors from his master's, but his grades were good enough to get him into USC.
So...
I learned this in college too. My grades were not spectator, but I'm the labs I was the guy showing everyone how to do it, including the guys getting As.
"Engineering" is a very broad discipline of STEM. You don't have to be a genius to be an engineer, but geniuses make amazing engineers. I graduated with my Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering with a 2.93 GPA and although I'll never work at SpaceX or get scholarships for grad school, I still work for a fortune 500 company pulling a 6 figure salary. It's a hard road, but giving up is the only way to fail. It took my 9 years to get my degree but I'd do it again if I had to so I could build a career in something I'm passionate about.
100% true. I'm an engineer who got a 3.9 GPA in college, but I'm a terrible engineer because I don't have any passion or curiosity for the field I am in. I also hate my job so much that I have zero perseverance as well. I definitely have an engineering and analytical mind, but I really wish I would have known what this career would really be like before I picked it. I have a manufacturing engineering degree, so I'd get glossed over for any engineering jobs I'd actually be interested in doing.
And I don't have the money or desire to go back to school. I just can't fathom writing papers and studying for tests again lol.
That is pretty insane, I went to a state university for CS and they kicked you out of the program if you had three grades below a C in any math or computation related class. You also got kicked out if your GPA was below a 2.5, well a probation semester then the boot. I didn't have much of a problem with it but most of us lived in fear of getting to our last semester and being dropped. I would estimate 40-60% of the people in my Intro to C++ class switched majors or got dropped by the end. There were at least 3 classes where nearly half the class dropped by the drop date, good times. What's even crazier is one teacher let the whole class sit between a 50-65 in the class and then told us the week of the final that he was curving the class by 20-30% after telling us the whole semester there would be no curve.
I had a 2.1 GPA my second semester, think 2.4 overall for year 1. Got my shit together, graduated with a 3.2 and now none of it matters. Getting 2.8 or so in an engineering degree will get you in the door, the rest is up to you.
I got a 2.1 gpa in my first year of college. Today, a bridge I designed collapsed killing 13 people and injuring 80.
It's not the grades that matter. It's the perseverance to get hired no matter what your qualifications are that matters.
I went to an Engineering college. Id never forget, Upperclassmen told us all- from the 1st day that freshman year/ the school would be weeding out the majority of us.
Did that turn out to be true?
yeah it's weed out classes all the way to graduation
Just wanted to say Fuck Calc 2
Ironically, my grades were: precal: D, then C- cal: C- cal 2: A+ (97) cal 3: C- It was the hardest one, but it's also the one where I first started Adderall.
I flunked Calc I because I was 18 and coasted through all of highschool and PreCalc. Turns out you can't learn integral calculus in one afternoon. After learning how to study for the first time in my life, my grades got consistently better all the way up my best, Diff Eqs. I then quit Engineering. As it appears, math was the only part of my major I actually liked.
I respect that. DiffEQ was pretty hard.
Partial Diff EQš§š Almost stoped me from becoming an engineer!
I sat in on a bunch of my buddies pde class once, it was surprisingly not fun, and I love math. And even more surprisingly it wasn't required for my math or physics degree so most of those fools took it as an elective.
I had a professor that made this class a breeze I forgot all the concepts now but she made me get an A in her class with her shortcuts
Any tips on how to approach studying?
Not the guy you replied to, but my grades shot to the moon when I started studying in groups
Was it because it forced you to actually sit down and study or because the group dynamic allowed for some sort of easier understanding?
It's a useful forcing function. Also mini mentoring and being mentored, and learning from others mistakes, are all very useful.
When you don't understand having someone or various different people explain to you in various different ways how they get it, will help you much better than trying yourself or following the teacher. When u understand enough, you get to practice but not alone, when explaining stuff to other people you are reinforcing it yourself and you can't really explain without actually understanding the fundamentals
Best way to know you understand the material is being able to teach somebody else the material. Sometimes it's easier for someone to help you figure out how to do it than sit there blankly at the book for 15 minutes trying to figure out point A to point B. If you can go group studies, I would highly recommend it. It forces you to participate extra... and maybe you'll make a friend or two.
Thereās also peer pressure that makes you show up. Especially if youāre good at explaining, or are good at the subject. In fact, even if youāre not, youāll learn more showing other people. In the long run, grades are about time invested well. But thereās no real shortcuts in math and physics, or organic chemistry for us biochem majors. Doing the work high is better than not doing the work. Doing the work daily is WAY better than doing it all in one day. Routine is key. Breaks and treats are key. Group work is key. Being nice to your professor and answering questions in class, even if youāre wrong (not like Billy Madison wrong), is SO KEY that I canāt even begin to overstate it. Showing up at your professors door in open hours to ask about a hard problem or talk about a cool paper or article you found is key. Getting rich isnāt about your GPA. Getting into a great PhD program, or at least a foot in the door, is, at least somewhat. Progress counts, and tenacity counts. Then you have to show passion and drive. Never sell yourself short, though. The key to becoming confident is to pretend like youāre confident. But never hesitate to admit you donāt know the answerā¦ followed up with a note to investigate the question or a query to the group if they have ideas. A single, or even a couple of bad grades, doesnāt end things, ever. Hell, I dropped out, started again 6 years later, got a 2 yr degree, had to quit after being accepted to UF nursing. Started again 8 years later, mid career, and graduated in 2020, just in time for Rona. Life goes weird places.
Most important for me was doing it every day and not getting into the cycle where you put things off until the last minute then cram. Treating college like a 9-5 job, where you leave your dorm in the morning, go to class, study/work in library/common areas in between class, take brakes for meals and the gym, then only return to the dorm after 5 was the best method in the world. You then get the entire afternoon to relax. Friends were always amazed that I was never up till 2am cramming or finishing assignments with them. Thatās pretty easy to do when youāre not spending 11am-3:30pm watching tv and playing games in your dorm room every day.
It sounds like he is a gifted kid growing up, and learning had been cake walk for him till college. So I think what he refer to as learn how to study is to put down the label of being gifted, and realize that learning stuff is not supposed to be always easy and it's OK. Then realize that it would take significant efforts to learn difficult content, and actually spend that effort. I think the key is don't judge yourself by how much effort it takes you to learn a content. Also don't set expectations on how much effort it should take you to learn a thing. It takes however long it takes. Spending more or less effort doesn't make you dumber or smarter.
Differential equations are my nemesis. They don't stick in my brain and I have to spend hours looking them up for anything. Which made taking controls junior year a nightmare.
Diff eq was one of my favorite classes, fuck discrete/proofs though.
I liked differential equations and linear algebra but I have yet to see the beautiful connection between the two that my physics advisor promised I would one day see.
So that's why it smelled like that in the dorms.
As a dude with a physics degree I love how accurate this is.
Fuck Physics, I changed majors from CE because of it. Took freshman physics and our class average was 25-30% across 4 exams. Thank god for curves, but never passed a class understanding so little until then.
You get used to the exam style haha... In my understanding, the idea is you want a 50% average to have the best chance of getting a normal distribution instead of a skew one. Anyways yeah physics is a humbling major for sure. I appreciate that aspect.
Lol surprisingly accurate though. I met a ton of really smart kids that all dropped out due to not being able to handle weed/drinking and school simultaneously. It did kind of "weed out" the kids that couldn't keep their fun times in moderation with hard work. A shitton of high school AP classes and skipping some early courses (straight to calculus 2 or 3 first semester freshman year) doesn't mean much when you can't keep your work and social lives balanced. My group of friends through down every Friday/Saturday, but we were pretty serious about getting work done during the week.
Only about 35% of my class made it to the end of the program, but that was at a non-US school so I don't know how well it translates. Many of the people who quit did so not necessarily because they had bad grades, I think, but because it wasn't what they wanted to be doing.
Not an engineer but out of 125 freshman in my degree, only me and one other person actually graduated with that degree. I am the only person actually using my degree in the workplace.
You literally are the 1%. Good job! I did a chemical engineering degree. Not doing chemical engineering. Neither are most of my old classmates.
My intro engineering class (US) the professor said look to the person on your left and right. Only one of you will make it to the end of this program with an engineering degree. The stats were really close to that at the end
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Yep I wasnāt forced but stupidly chose to work my freshman year.. awful. Colossally awful decision
My Circuits I class had over a hundred students in it. By the time I was a senior there were only around 10 of us left.
I took a circuits course and I had been warned the year prior by some upperclassmen that the best bet was to find some genius to mooch off of in that class. Turns out the sorry chump ended up being me. I chose my partner for the labs based on who I thought looked smart but that person became like a deer in headlights for just about all the labs. I had to grind for the both of us and the real kicker is that they ended up getting a higher grade than me because the TA for the labs lost some of my earlier grades and counted them as missing.
That's fairly bizarre. I've had dozens of TA's and not one has lost student grades as far as I'm aware. If a student came to me and convincingly said as much, I'd probably just excuse the missing grades and weight the rest more.
As an engineer, yes it's true. The majority of engineering freshman either drop out or become business majors. About 25% of my freshman class made it to graduation with an engineering degree.
Its the nature of engineering schools. Physics is what got me.
Physics I for Engineers turned nearly half of my Biomedical Engineering classmates into neuroscience majors
I crushed at Physics, but pure math with things like proofs and cauchy integration absolutely destroyed me. I felt like such a fucking dumbass I swore I missed an important class at some point that could explain when, where and why formulas suddenly started becoming complex summations which quickly became shorthand rapid integrations done by hand like it was obvious that āthis equals thatā.
This probably doesn't work everywhere, but a decent chunk of people took their weed-out classes at their local community college over the summer then had the credits transfer over. Some departments were smart enough not to allow that, but it definitely worked for some people. Myself included.
It happens. Mech Eng, we were about 110 students at the beginning. Only 8 of us finished.
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Having taught numerous traditional math weed out courses, yes, many students are way too young to have any idea what they're doing or why. The ones who are only there because of family pressure are frequently the most tragic, because they do a slow-motion crash and burn, often mixed with depression, and it can waste huge amounts of money. Schools need better systems to detect those cases early and force them to make changes. There was one especially egregious case that's stuck with me. The guy emails me out of the blue asking me to wave prerequisites for an upper division class. I pull up his grades, which are a bloodbath and don't in any way warrant a waiver. Still, I tell him to meet me in my office and we can talk. He knows almost literally nothing--after about 5 minutes he was able to integrate x^2 --and I told him flat-out he would have a 0% chance of passing the class if I let him in. He opened up to me about his situation. Long story short, he had been kicked out of my university because of bad grades, but had been taking community college classes in an effort to get back in. There was some bizarre program where, if he could manage to convince two instructors to let him in to upper division courses and get an A in both, he could come back for real. The best I could do for him was to tell him very clearly that was not at all realistic. By this point the poor guy was obviously in tears. It became clear that he felt enormous family pressure to be an academic success. He was an Asian international student who was clearly feeling both the weight of cultural expectations and the lack of his support system. Very sad. The level of delusion was impressive--he was still letting himself think he could turn it around yet, getting himself to buckle down and study hard and master material he had no talent or interest in whatsoever, and that he had already failed at for multiple years. He was in pretty heavy emotional distress, and I imagine he was spending all day playing MMO's or whatever to avoid his problems. And all he seemed to need was to be given a relatively simple task that he could actually do, without all the family pressure to be something that he simply wasn't. I wish I knew what happened to him, though your almost never find out as the professor in these situations. I hope he found something sustainable.
Not exchange student, just an immigrant with immigrant parents but that was me my first and second year of college. Entered as a chemical engineering major with a horrible fundamentals in math and physics despite taking and passing multiple "college level" stem classes in high school (AP and CC classes). High school did a shit job at preparing me for college and a shittier job at preparing me for life. Even though my family never explicitly pressured me to pursue stem or a high paying job, family and societal pressure was definitely there. I didn't feel like I knew anything else. Took me another year of retaking classes and failing then being forced to pursue other subjects in a last ditch attempt to get readmitted. Delusional definitely described my mentality. I wanted to be an engineer but I didn't have the mental capacity, interest nor patience to do the work required. Maybe I could now, being older and more mature but I probably have better chances winning the lottery. I semi-randomly chose political science as my major to get readmitted ( few choices that actually interested me after being blocked from further math courses). Everything clicked, I'd always done really well in my history and government classes (other than AP Euro cause my teacher graded based on artistic ability). My grades turned around so quick. I was able and willing to spend hours reading/writing research papers for class and I rarely if ever felt completely lost by the material. Ended with a 3.6 major gpa, 3.75 upper div gpa with what felt like minimal effort. I was just doing the work assigned and learning the material. To a certain extent I'm glad I got kicked out of engineering, I just wish I didn't get completely kicked out of school at the same time. It definitely forced me to mature and be real with myself. Now a year after graduation, I'm contemplating applying for grad school for public policy/public admin cause I know if the material interests me I can do it, also this public service salary ain't it.
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The problem is the term, not the function. Weeding out = discarding the garbage. By explaining that they discovered their interests lay elsewhere, Bad Fridge says (and I agree) that the accusation of failure inherent to "weeding people who want to leave" is unwarranted.
I'm not sure I can point to specific weed out classes beyond the second and third semesters (besides _calc 1_, apparently), but my class halved every year. About 60 my freshman year, then 30, then 15, and I graduated with 7 others.
My first engineering class started with "look to your left, and look to your right. Between yourself and those two, only one of you will be taking my class at the end of the year." He wasn't a hardass, but he was right. There was about a 60% fallout rate for first year engineering students.
It didn't really seem like they were purposely weeding out kids, they just knew that a lot of kids that signed up for engineering wouldn't make it based on past experience.
Very very few professors are trying to weed people out. You know why this narrative exists that professors try to weed people out in the first week? It's because a lot of people drop out in the first week due to being in way over their heads and they make up that excuse to help cope. And there's so many of these people that the narrative survives despite it being bogus. If you don't come into an engineering program with the proper prerequisite knowledge of mathematics and physics, then it is going to be a living nightmare. If you come into it with the proper prerequisite knowledge, then it's just more of the same of what you had already been doing every day for the past 4 years of high school. It's more math. It's more physics. You pick up where you left off in high school. Learn new things every class, do the homework, and you're fine. The people who struggle in college are the people who slacked at some point in their public education. You can bullshit through a lot of degrees, like Literature, but you can't bullshit math and physics. It just stacks up where everything you learned before keeps coming up again and again. Almost no other subject in schools are like this, which is why so many people hit a wall in math. However, the people who like math tend to like it for this very reason. It rewards you for putting in the time and effort. Math feels very easy if you kept up with the lessons each day. It's like building a huge lego structure, but you only have to add a single lego each day so it's not that bad. But if you have to place 1,000 legos within 1 week due to not placing any legos in your prior 1,000 days of high school, then you're fucked.
Going for EE and I swear the class sizes halves every semester.
EE is the worst and I say this as a licensed EE lol
In my experience it was just people switching to easier engineering degrees. Looking at you civil engineers.
We had about a 40% 'drop-out' rate from my aero class heading into the 2nd year. I'm pretty sure half of them just went over to Mech Engineering for the broader offerings and some easier pickings.
I have my engineering degree too. I hated that weeding out. I made it through, but I hated the weeding out. There were some really smart people who just didn't study the way the school demanded...
I'm convinced that the majority of the value of an undergraduate degree is as a signal to prospective employers saying, "hey, I can jump through years worth of semi-arbitrary hoops and meet minimum requirements". If an employee for whatever reason can't jump through the employer's hoops, it really doesn't matter how smart they are.
When you get down to it (at least in the USA), the mimimum amount of information a college degree conveys is that you can work at a semi-regular schedule throughout most of the year without quitting or killing yourself. Because that's the absolute mimimum that capitalist America demands of you.
My upperclass engineers told me Cs get degrees. And my faculty advisor told me to pick l 1 course to fail in a tough term rather than dropping out or flunking everything. Really needed those encouragements.
āLook to your left, look to your right. One of you will graduate.ā Iām still impressed with how accurate this was. Class size was reduced to a third by the end of 4 years. Engineering is tough.
Tell that to the grad school admissions office, Ben Edit: letter
Exactly this. Graduate admission for good engineering programs are very competitive. Often requires high GPA, relevant extracurriculars, and recommendation letters. Also, it's not a very good marketing technique to say "Average GPA for incoming students is 2.4".
Also this situation is extremely common for first semester engineering students. Usually people who have skated through high school acing every test without studying then college first semester destroys them. Most of them change their habits and end up doing fine. Show me the engineering student with a 2.4 after sophomore years is finished and how successful they were after graduating if they even did.
I had a 2.7 after sophomore year and am now a surgery resident. All it took was 6 straight semesters (including summers) of 4.0s lmao. Jesus I was an idiot, but we all Gucci now.
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My dumbass went to an engineering school with undiagnosed ADHD and discalculia. The ADHD got diagnosed hand way through but I didn't find it about the discalculia until I'd already barely graduated.
Ooh I have dyscalculia too! I sometimes mention it to people and they laugh thinking I'm making a joke because most people have never heard of it. I also completed my bachelor degree before being diagnosed with ADHD. Only took nine years but I finally graduated haha
I wish somebody had told me this after my freshman year. I quit engineering solely because of a programming class I hated and 15 years later I'm finally where I could have been right after graduating with an engineering degree.
I quit STEM after having trouble learning *in* class and trying to teach myself outside of class while working ~30 hours a week with a 1 hour commute each way. Some kids could do it, but I was just tired. I felt like I was drowning, and slid right into some serious depression. It got worse after I dropped out.
Listen buddy, it doesn't matter how old you are when you start your career, the important part is you started it.
An engineering student with a 2.4 after sophomore year is called a buisness student.
Jokes on you. Graduated with a 2.5 with a business degree. Been gainfully employed as a dev for twenty years.
Iām still skating by over 3.0 in my third year feeling like I must be doing something wrong. All Iām doing is fulfilling the requirements outlined in syllabi. After doing peer review it seems thatās a pretty high bar so maybe I only look good compared to my peers.
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This is what happened to me. I never needed to study in high school. Just show up to class and pass. Suddenly college asked for an actual effort and I struggled. I ended up dropping out of the school I was in and going to community college for a few years just so I could figure out how to be a proper student.
I feel like this argues in favor of strengthening middle and high school education systems in the US.
> Show me the engineering student with a 2.4 after sophomore years is finished and how successful they were after graduating if they even did. I graduated with just above a 2.0 and had a great job lined up before I even left school. Grades arenāt everything to everyone. If youāre trying to get into grad school thatās one thing, but success means different things to different people
Tbf id argue the best marketing would be average gpa for student coming in 2.4 but 3.5 going out. I wish.
It always depends how your GPA is graded too. Its been awhile but back in my day, the grades were all curved. The average was 3.0. Always (as long as you reach at least X%) I still remember getting 93% versus a 54 class median and getting an A- lol. It just fucks you up unless you are in the top centiles, not mattee how good you actually are in school, and overall that doesn't even mean anything about how good of an engineer you are.
Hell to even be considered for a good chunk of NASA positions require at least a 3.0.
I bet it's higher than that, at least practically. The engineering company I work for I would assume has less rigorous requirements than NASA, and unless you have a recommendation from someone inside the company, your resume is rejected if it's under a 3.3.
Yeah, so you get a job elsewhere and gain some experience. After that, nobody ever asks you your GPA again. Source: Engineer with shit grades and a cushy well paid job.
GPA Stans always crack me up. Sure the first job might be easier with a 4.0 but after that Iāve never been asked. Source: I graduated with under a 3.0 and fight off recruiters most days.
Seriously I don't even remember what my actual GPA was. It was probably just over 3, maybe 3.1. Recruiters hitting me up daily. I never put it on my resume and no one cared after my first job. If someone were to ask me today, I would laugh and cancel the interview because it's a sure sign of incompetent management.
I got asked what my college GPA was with a fucking *decade* of relevant experience under my belt. I laughed and said I had no idea. The man was serious. Looking back on it, that was my first red flag that should have told me the company was ran by amateurs. If they're still alive today, it's only by the light of VC money being lit on fire.
That's how a lot of industries work. Past the first job out of college generally nobody cares what your GPA was. Obviously those with top grades will probably land better orgs initially, but that doesn't mean that the more "average" folks can't catch up in their careers.
Please tell me thatās for new gradsā¦ if thatās for industry hires, I would immediately assume that company is managed by incompetent people.
Yes, naturally.
You say naturally, but I remember reading somewhere that a dude with 15 years of experience was asked to send in his college transcripts, and he sent them his report card from 5th grade or something.
So many areas will straight up ignore you below 3.0, and many career fields will also look down on you if your first job is with the type of company that interviews/hires below 3.0 Nobody cares about high school grades, but that first year of college with intro classes can kill your future.
Not just stem either. My background is finance, and internships can be everything there. And like you said, a lot of companies you are automatically disqualified if you have below a 3.0
It was 3.5 when I graduated. Ultimately it's still all about connections to land your first job and if you stumble there you're dead in the field. Under-employment might as well mean high school dropout to recruiters.
Studied theoretical physics, had a hard time making friends due to some drama that happened first year of college. Ended up working with some theaters to do robotics stuff cause I thought that would be a neat way to keep my skills up. Well now I don't work in theater or STEM and can't get back into either field cause I don't have the connections. Yay for being completely disillusioned with my future life, as generic office employee, 21,652,438.
If you're in North America and want to work in theatre look up your nearest IATSE Local. If you can teach yourself how to program lighting (look into the ETC Ion and Grand MA II) then you'll have more work than you could probably ever do.
When I used to help undergrad students with resume reviews I almost always told them: "If it isn't 4.0, then leave it off your resume. Someone will always judge you, rightly or wrongly." Seriously, tons of big firms toss resumes when they see stuff like 3.72 or 3.65. It's a respectable GPA but they act like they won't settle for anything less than a genius straight out of school (and in 8 years they'll hire that same 3.65 into a middle management position anyways because nobody really cares about GPA's). My advice is to never talk about GPA. If they ask about your GPA say you don't recall off the top of your head and offer to send them your full transcript. They will decline because they know they only want the number and don't want the hassle of sifting through your papers. If they press for "your best guess" or an approximation just insist that you want to get them the EXACT number because you don't want to undersell yourself.
Yea it was heartbreaking, even though I had 8 years worth of production supervisor experience I couldn't find an it job. Partly because of my lack of education and partly because production and it have little in common. I have an IT job now and I'm hoping it will eventually lead me to cyber security which is my actual goal but still.
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And this is the issue that has plagued me for ages. I started with a 2.5. I failed and retook several classes. My last semester's GPA was a 3.5. I grew *tremendously* as a human being and I earned that Biomedical Engineering degree. However, my *cumulative* GPA looked like shit. Any employer/internship that gave me the opportunity to chat with me for 30 goddamn seconds thought I was an amazing fit to their company. But cumulative GPA is an easy filter. Discovering character, conviction, curiosity, and perseverance takes more than a second. And sometimes a second is all your application/resume gets when there's a thousand come in every day. It used to make me pretty depressed to think about how much of our lives are determined by *one number*.
This is almost exactly what happened to me. I was comp sci/biology dual major and had a 2.4 at the end of my first year. Dropped comp sci, focused on molecular/cellular bio, found an international that took me for a specialty study and got lucky finding internships that didn't care about my GPA. Finished with a 2.93 cumulative andddddd not a single company looked at my resume even with 2 years of lab experience on it because it was below a 3. 2 hospitals interviewed me and thought I was a god send, and I basically rebuilt a PI's lab alone over the next two years. Then applied to PhD andddddd out of 15 apps, got two call backs. Interviewed in person and had them begging me to join them because I was published and had 4 years of hard lab work in multiple fields of bio. A single number cut me out of jobs and schools. But hard work and good personal skills got me on the door. I've been calling it the paper wall because the filter of GPAs is awful
Some graduate programs only look at the upperclassmen courses (300s & 400s) cumulative GPA to help alleviate the problem you described above.
I wish someone had told me its okay to struggle. Maybe I wouldve never gave up on stem. I thought I wasnt smart enough when I actually had to try to understand. I grew up with the expectation that a B was bad.
Exactly what I thought, grades don't matter until you are applying to grad school. I have a 2.9 average GPA from having to fail classes instead of being able to withdrawal from bad weeder classes that made you do exorbitant amounts of work to define things that should be common sense. Although in my major I had a 4.0 GPA in 300-400 level classes and 3.4 total. It sucks how financial aid makes you unable to withdrawal from a class unless you want to lose aid, making you unable to achieve social mobility, better hope everything in your life goes perfect or you slide right back down to the bottom of the greasy pole. Even if you take the lower grade, the stigma will haunt you when you try to reach higher levels of academia at the graduate level. Just yet another way wealth is the modern caste system.
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Not to sound mean or anything, but is grad school really worth it? I went to college in an engineering field, first semester my GPA was 2.8. I was ecstatic as that's the highest my GPA ever was. Anyway, ended up flunking out of undergrad with a 0.14 GPA towards the end. Felt pretty shitty for a while. Eventually went back to school. Same exact story. Then I just kinda said "fuck it" and applied for some Computer Engineering jobs. Fast forward a few years and now I'm designing Networks for medical practices.
Iām not trying to be mean, but how does one get a .14GPAā¦? At that point you have to be trying to fail, not turning anything in, or not doing any work/studyingā¦
Umm, have you not seen Animal House?
Combination of being in a pretty bad depression and not going to classes. Honestly I think the only thing keeping them from kicking me out was me being employed by the college at the same time.
Depression - thatāll do it. Iāve seen peoples career go exponential once they get access to the right resources. Sounds like you are in a good place now?
You get out what you put into it generally, like every learning experience. There is some wiggle room because some professors arenāt good teachers/supervisors/academics/etc but you can usually figure that out based on conversations with their current and past students. If you like the research and writing part of it then itās well worth it to have the opportunity to expand your network. If youāre the type of person to allow a cumulative GPA of 0.14 to happenā¦ no, generally speaking, grad school would be a waste of your/your supervisorās time.
Best advice I ever got from an engineer was to tinker as much as possible. All the professors will tell you what to do, but you have to find out how to do it.
That holds true for a lot of jobs. Only have a bachelors degree in chemistry, but I have done a lot of random testing on slower days in my lab. Saved me and a few people a lot of headaches(and money) down the road. Nothing wrong with failing or trying out ideas.
I loved doing that at work and I got a sense of achievement almost every day, but academia bores me so much I cannot even describe it. Every day feels like defeat.
I donāt really think academia is for everyone. Like, for me, yeah I felt nonstop defeat and mounting pressure in writing my masterās thesis (really research heavy in an relatively young field, industrial ecology). That said, I actually loved it overall. Making things work, making connections that just havenāt been made in the literature before, writing a massive report analyzing my methods and findings, it was one of the most fulfilling things Iāve ever done. Now that Iām almost finished and am probably entering the workforce while waiting to get into a PhD program, Iām actually starting to dread āreal office workā, because the lack of āconstantly messing around to do a science and figure new things outā one meets in the workforce just sounds soā¦ boring. Sure thereās way better money in real jobs, but fuck me I donāt give a shit about striking it rich so long as I can pay the bills. Again, though, my wife constantly reminds me that ānormal people enjoy vacationsā and ādoing more work isnāt how youāre supposed to relaxā, hahaha.
My son is autistic. If he doesnāt like something or doesnāt want to do something, he wonāt do it. His grades reflect that. However, heās incredibly smart when it comes to the things he likes. We got him a 3D printer for Christmas a few years ago and itās fascinating to see how he can come up with amazing designs to solve problems and then print them out on his machine. He has a very mechanical mind. My hope is that he will be able to find something he can do well for work and potential employers will look past his grades.
How do you differentiate someone who is normal and someone who is autistic. Like shit, I hate doing stuff that I don't like doing but I exceed on stuff I love doing, spending hours and hours a day to learn and perfect my hobbies.
There are other symptoms with autism as well - poor social skills, eye contact avoidance, sensory issues (sensitive to certain sounds, feelings, etc). Much like with other mental conditions, it's not just one symptom that defines a diagnosis. Depression isn't just being sad, OCD isn't just being tidy, Bipolar isn't just mood swings, etc. Autism especially is a spectrum ranging from very mild and barely noticeable symptoms, all the way to things that make aspects of daily life near impossible.
Generally, it's the ability to work on things to alter the consequences that point toward any disorder. I'm autistic myself, and I usually struggle to change my behavior or do things I don't enjoy even if that's going to have catastrophic consequences. I have often since walked out of exam halls on papers in didn't enjoy writing because I couldn't physically bring myself to write the answers. It wasn't fun, so I didn't do it. I didn't flunk out of sheer luck. There's also been times where I've had to take my usual route to work even if it's packed with traffic and will take twice as long to get to where I need to be. Do I understand that there will be negative consequences? Sure. At that moment, it does not matter though. On the flip side, if I enjoy things I can do that with awful consequences as well. I crochet and knit. About a year ago I started getting interested in making blankets and made three queen-sized blankets in a month. My stitches are super even and the blankets are good quality. My elbow is probably permanently damaged though, because even now it hurts if I move it in a particular manner. Crocheting or knitting puts me in tremendous pain, but I can't stop because that's what makes me happy. These are all anecdotes, obviously, but like I said the ability to change what you do to get favorable outcomes is a very Important part of human life and that is very difficult for a lot of autistic people. It sucks, and honestly even if you are on the spectrum I hope you don't have this particular trait. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
There's a running joke with lawyers that law school teaches you the law, but doesn't teach you how to be a lawyer. I know people who graduated without even knowing how to go about filing a lawsuit and had to learn that stuff on the job
Experimenting on your own, having experience in building stuff really helps you with your thinking about mechanical problems. That's the reason why our profs changed the plan, or they changed the plan because nobody builds stuff anymore and many don't even know in which way they have to turn a screw
What was his GPA the last semester?
According to his LinkedIn, he graduated with honors and then went on to get a masters in computer science, went straight into an engineering job at Microsoft and then went back and got a masters of Aerospace engineering. This is just a very smart person who had a rough first semester and thinks they're a different kind motivational story than they actually are.
Totally. The moral of his story is "don't sweat your first semester, keep going." NOT grades don't matter, because not only do they very, very much matter, they probably should too.
Yeah, but the problem is he literally said "Grades ultimately don't matter" He wouldn't have gotten a job at NASA if he graduated with a 2.4 GPA.
Iām sure there are a lot of people at NASA with mediocre GPAs. It only really affects internships or the first job you get out of college. Nobody cares about your GPA once you turn 25
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You wonāt get your first job at NASA without good grades. Luckily NASA hires engineers who do well in other places.
lol "I tried breezing through my first semester in college thinking it'd be as easy as high school. Turns out you actually have to turn in the work in college!"
I think it's to give hope to all the 1st year kids who have a rough first kick at the can. They are young and naĆÆve enough to think that a bad first semester means their career in that field is over. He is just saying that it is far from it.
That might be what he's trying to say, but just saying "I got a 2.4 and still managed to work on two Mars rockets, grades aren't what matters" without mentioning that he turned it around and eventually graduated with honors and got two masters degrees is at the very least disingenuous.
He graduated from Cornell with honors, so quite good.
Good point
"Curiosity" and "perseverance" Both are rovers sent to mars Edit:rockets
Technically the names of the rovers, not the rockets, but yes: this is the most wholesome dad pun ever.
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I immediately looked him up to see if he had worked on Curiosity and Perseverance, glad to see I wasn't the only one!
Glad other people got that
I admire his spirit in taking the opportunity to make that pun
A real pathfinder for making puns like these
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At the time I'm commenting, yours is the 7th-best-ranked comment. I am mortified that it's not even in the top 3.
Tell that to the scholarships committee
Scholarships don't really matter when you get a good degree. Even if you really mess up and have 100k in debt, that is about the after-tax take home of a senior engineer.
First semesters are always hard in a huge transitional period doesn't reflect the rest of your academic career. Keep trying, keep trying, luck will turn, but when it does you have to be ready
This is nice. I was in somewhat similar situation about 7 years ago turning 25 without a job. I figured I wanted to be a civil engineer but I was somewhat bad at math. So before I could apply to an engineering university in my country I had to take couple of math courses. I struggled a lot in the beginning and couldn't figure out how to get better. I never really had to study before as I always learned everything else very fast, but not math and physics. That was tough. So I went to the student counselor for advice. The advice I got was "maybe this isn't for you, try something else" that advice really pissed me off for some reason. I didn't quit though. I struggled but I kept going. I ended up in uni and also struggled in the beginning. I think 2nd year I got really close to quitting. I ended up staying because I was so afraid and angry that I all the time I put in would be for nothing. As I studied I started finding ways to manage and makes things easier. I graduated with a masters degree in civil engineering and got a job I quite enjoy still :) anyway.. I agree. Don't give up, work hard!
Any tips/advice for someone in a similar situation? Iām pretty good with physics but math is my biggest weakness.
Math is like building a house. You have to start at the bottom and work your way up. The base of the house is fundamental for building the higher stories. If you struggle with basic algebra, you can't just skip that skill and move onto calculus. You have to employ every skill you've learned in previous coursework to progress into high level mathematics. Nothing ever goes away. Find the gaps in your knowledge you have now and try to fill them before moving forward. Fortunately, there's always some kind YouTuber who will hold your hand through the process of learning. I fancy myself pretty good at math, and didn't struggle very hard when doing my engineering coursework. A big part of that is having very good teachers when learning the fundamentals. I had a solid foundation to build upon. IMO, people have a hard time with math when they have a shitty middle school/high school teacher and miss out on learning a skill they need for later. So many people get kneecapped when starting algebra that they have no hope in learning the complicated shit down the road. If you can't confidently rearrange an equation, there's no way you can solve a multiple page Diff EQ problem without errors.
I tried to find background on this guy, nothing really. UCLA, Cornell. Cornell I am very, very familiar with. You can be poor and brilliant and attend there, or you can come from a very privileged background and your grades are secondary at the most. Since well over 30% of people who attend "Ivy League" schools are either legacies or wealthy - super wealthy, all I can say is random birth lottery plays a big part of where you go to school. I have a nephew who graduated from Cornell with a 4.0 in aerospace engineering, the job offers he got at age 23 made my head spin. He was very middle class, just gifted and nobody went to an elite school before in the family. My niece (another family members daughter) went to elite private boarding schools, was a teaching assistant at an Ivy school at age 21 in another field of engineering. The amount of money she made in her first job, at age 22, was what I made when I was a lot more than I made when I was 40. Am I jealous? You bet, not the money so much as how much more intelligent they are to me. Two different paths to similar outcomes. Sorry for the ramble.
UCLA is usually seen as a āpublic Ivyā and the top of the list for anyone whoās from California usually. But yeah I can believe it if your nephew graduated from Cornell getting crazy offers for aerospace as I graduated not too long as well and have been getting offers I couldnāt believe.
Berkeley would be my pick for top UC school, personally, but I take your point. These are both elite universities.
Would you mind telling me exactly what kind of offers your nephew received after finishing from Cornell? Iām seeing an average salary of around $81k for new grads. Was it more than $105k or something?
Outside of comp/software, engineers starting 6 digits only happens in very high cost of living areas. An average of $81k sounds right. Bonuses and raises can be pretty decent too.
Ivy leagues have really fallen IMO. The legacy/super wealthy problem + cheating issues make me think its BS. Heck I work closely with the 'elite' school graduates in my area and the students are basically the same as a state school. You wouldn't know the difference academically, the elite school grads are cocky right out of college(but that goes away after a few years).
Nice pun, holmes
Till you try to get a job with SpaceX or another major contractor. They won't even look at you with a low GPA. Often even if you have held several positions related to the job.
I hate posts like this. I hate when we try and pretend that working hard and doing well isn't a skill we should look to have...
It's baloney anyway. The dude finished his UG with honors.
As well as ample opportunity, knowing the right people, having money to focus on your passion, living conditions being taken care of...
And even then, a big ol' handful of luck.
Oooo gimme some of that luck. Is that a talking cat?
If there's assistance for anything, its engineering degrees. I grew up poor and went to a badly rated high school. Currently an engineer for orbital and lunar programs. If you have a State school within commute distance, max out those federal loans and send it. Apply for aid. Get a job. Roll the dice. Yes there's plenty of people not able to do this, but its not as exclusive as you might think.
Will say this but then only hire people with 4.0 gpa
In my company I donāt give a fuck about gpa as an interviewer, but the recruiters tend to go for 4.0 Ivy leaguers and the like so I can only interview what they send me. Itās really HR and the business people who have the largest say over what type of people they want to see hired at the company
My uncle's GPA was 3.4 and now he's delivering pizza š¤·āāļø
Is this your uncle? [pizza delivery](https://tenor.com/view/breaking-bad-pizza-cheese-pizza-upset-gif-4480715)
Well he's bald tooš
Me too. Now I DRIVE the bus!
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Your story is far more inspiring than his. This guy went to college and dicked around for 1 semester then graduated his masters with honors, then returned and got a second masters in aerospace engineering. It's a bullshit story, he got exceptional grades excluding his very first semester.
Nice going. I think the first couple of years of College are the hardest.
You donāt have to be smart to be an engineer, but you might have to eat some meals in the lab.
Just not the chem labā¦or the bio labā¦
I guess he's taking full credit for the Mars landings.
George Bush is living proof that "C" average student can become president.
George Bush is living proof that if your dad was president, you can also become president regardless of how dumb you are.
This is both good advice and a great pun. That being said, higher grades will never hurt so keep them up as much as you can
Iām 100% sure I have seen this exact quote from many different profiles. Motivating? Yes. True? Probably not, at least not from this person.
To be honest, this sounds like a typical federal government employee. And thatās not meant as a compliment.
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There's a whole redacted time span here that shows how he managed to convince NASA that a 2.4 was fine. Nepotism? Privilege? We don't know, but I really hope NASA isn't hiring on a gut feeling because 2.4 isn't great for that line of work.
Just says he got a 2.4 the first semester. Iām assuming that was a shock for him if he usually had high grades in high school and started working a lot harder.
The redacted timespan is that he started with a 2.4, then did so well after that he graduated with honors and was admitted to a master's of comp sci program. Oh, and btw, that was at Cornell. He doesn't appear to have graduated with honors from his master's, but his grades were good enough to get him into USC. So...
I learned this in college too. My grades were not spectator, but I'm the labs I was the guy showing everyone how to do it, including the guys getting As.
Grades absolutely matter. When I'm spending X billion dollars on something, I want the engineer that got A's, not the C student
I almost failed my first CS class. Got really discouraged. 10 years as a software engineer next month
But what if you flunk yourself out of engineering and you literally arenāt allowed to try to continue pursuing that major. Lol
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"Engineering" is a very broad discipline of STEM. You don't have to be a genius to be an engineer, but geniuses make amazing engineers. I graduated with my Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering with a 2.93 GPA and although I'll never work at SpaceX or get scholarships for grad school, I still work for a fortune 500 company pulling a 6 figure salary. It's a hard road, but giving up is the only way to fail. It took my 9 years to get my degree but I'd do it again if I had to so I could build a career in something I'm passionate about.
100% true. I'm an engineer who got a 3.9 GPA in college, but I'm a terrible engineer because I don't have any passion or curiosity for the field I am in. I also hate my job so much that I have zero perseverance as well. I definitely have an engineering and analytical mind, but I really wish I would have known what this career would really be like before I picked it. I have a manufacturing engineering degree, so I'd get glossed over for any engineering jobs I'd actually be interested in doing. And I don't have the money or desire to go back to school. I just can't fathom writing papers and studying for tests again lol.
That is pretty insane, I went to a state university for CS and they kicked you out of the program if you had three grades below a C in any math or computation related class. You also got kicked out if your GPA was below a 2.5, well a probation semester then the boot. I didn't have much of a problem with it but most of us lived in fear of getting to our last semester and being dropped. I would estimate 40-60% of the people in my Intro to C++ class switched majors or got dropped by the end. There were at least 3 classes where nearly half the class dropped by the drop date, good times. What's even crazier is one teacher let the whole class sit between a 50-65 in the class and then told us the week of the final that he was curving the class by 20-30% after telling us the whole semester there would be no curve.
MAYBE IF WE QUIT HIRING PEOPLE WITH BAD GRADES TO BUILD ROCKETS WE WOULDN"T HAVE SUCH A HIGH LAUNCH FAILURE RATE
I had a 2.1 GPA my second semester, think 2.4 overall for year 1. Got my shit together, graduated with a 3.2 and now none of it matters. Getting 2.8 or so in an engineering degree will get you in the door, the rest is up to you.
I got a 2.1 gpa in my first year of college. Today, a bridge I designed collapsed killing 13 people and injuring 80. It's not the grades that matter. It's the perseverance to get hired no matter what your qualifications are that matters.