ronqman

I spoke with a prof (not my PI)) at the grad school I'll be attending yesterday and she mentioned her colleague was on a board with NSF and *just* got out of a meeting where NSF found out how much money they were getting from the gov this year. Like the meeting was either Monday or Tuesday morning. Not sure if that has anything to do with the delay but who knows! Fingers crossed for Friday though.

Hey so I have a 2.98 uGPA and I want to apply for PhD programs in biological oceanography/fisheries. I have a ton of research experience, including two long internships with different NOAA fisheries labs. It's about 4 years altogether of research experience and I have one paper (author 2 or 3 out of 3) to submit this fall and 2 more hopefully first author papers later this year. I know who I want to work with and I know exactly what I want out of a career, I'm just afraid my GPA is gonna scare some PIs away. I have terrible test anxiety so I have a ton of D's and even an F and most of these are in my core STEM classes (calc, physics, chem, bio). I don't want to waste money on applications if they're going to throw them right out, but I'm not sure if my research experience will outweigh that. Should I bother applying to PhD programs? Or maybe just focus on getting more experience or an MS?