fiendfyre

Thanks for all of the great advice. I was worried that my grades were going to hold me back, but I've decided to be confident and keep searching!

I'm a US-Korean dual citizenship holder currently in my last year of undergrad at a top 3 university in Korea. If all goes well, I'll graduate with a dual major in linguistics and CS - which are both areas that I am considering applying to for grad school, because I'm mostly interested in speech processing. I have a decent (in my opinion) GRE score of V: 160 / Q: 168 / W: 4.5. I also took the TOEFL just in case and received 116 (30/30/30/26). I've worked as a lab intern for a close CS professor for a little over a year now and have co-authored about two papers (that are CS topics but not particularly in my area of interest). However, my GPA is very poor. On a 4.5 scale, I'm currently at 3.47, which is roughly 3.1 on the 4.0 scale. I'm planning to retake six classes this semester which will hopefully bring my total up to 3.68 (or 3.3 on the 4.0 scale). I had very poor grades my first freshman semester, but I managed to keep my grades around 3.4~3.7 on the 4.0 scale for the next three semesters. The next two semesters were difficult for me because I started having panic attacks that greatly hurt my attendance, and unfortunately my GPA, which hit an all time low. I pulled out of the dip a little bit last semester but two semesters of very bad grades have permanently hurt my total GPA. I'm searching for potential schools currently but I'm worried about my low GPA and would like to know what would be considered as a 'safety school' in my situation? It seems like all of the schools I've looked at have only accepted applicants with nearly perfect GPAs and I'm not sure how to determine whether a certain school is a match or safety school for me. I'm starting to worry about whether I even have a shot at getting into any decent program.