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robinsoncrusoe

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    robinsoncrusoe reacted to OneMiramar in UCSD IRPS - 2015 Thread   
    Hi everyone, 
    I am a second year student at GPS (IE, China). I assume many of you are at UCSD already for prep, and I look forward to meeting you all in September! As a current student, I would just like to add on to the points made in the post above mine: 
    - In our class (a year after Karoku_valentine), we had at least two people fail the Quant/Econ required classes; neither of them are in the program anymore. So if you are not someone with a previous background in these subjects and are struggling to pick it up, please find a study group and/or friends to study with ASAP! The curve does help most people pass the classes even if they are struggling, but there are outliers, and if you aren't a Quant person, don't wait too long and let yourself be the unlucky one that has to retake the course. 
    - Career Services has a large network for private sector jobs. David Robinson in particular is an invaluable resource and I encourage all of you to be proactive and get in touch with him early! For government sector work though, IRPS/GPS has virtually no network outside of California. Compared to the traditional power programs in the East Coast, UCSD has no significant network to speak of in DC, all there currently is are individual graduates sparsely spread out amongst various three/four-lettered agencies (Other schools have blocks of alumni within these agencies). From what I've seen, UCSD has no plan or intention of developing its DC connections, so if you are attending GPS but you want to do federal government work once you graduate, you need to get a jump-start on that by yourself as Career Services won't be much help.
    - As Karoku_valentine mentioned, graduate placement (within the US, at least) is one of the biggest weaknesses of GPS, so be prepared to have to start earlier and do more to distinguish yourself from East Coast MIAs. To me, doing clubs (and taking on leadership responsibilities) and unique extracurriculars (of which there are plenty of in San Diego!) is the best way to go about this; in job and internship searches everyone is going to have a glittering GPA, so you need more than that to stand out in the crowd. Get a start on extracurriculars as soon as the first Trimester starts!
     
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