remy

I agree. If it was one bad grade I wouldn't, but an entire year of F's I'm planning to say something along the lines of "My grades from my sophomore year of college at [college] do not reflect my academic abilities. Aware that I was not achieving to my potential, I withdrew from university for one year to recover from an illness and reexamine my academic goals. When I came back to college, I did so with an appreciation for the intellectual challenges I would face and with gratitude for my second chance at academic studies. My record since returning to college.... Basically, deal with it but then quickly explain why events from 2007-2008 no longer matter when I'm applying in Fall 2011....

If you're looking for someone on the "snowball's chance in Hell" side of things, I'm your girl.

Thanks for this! Don't feel bad, I definitely needed to hear it, and to be honest I was expecting replies in the area of "LOL, don't even bother" so it's relieving to see that at some point in the future I still have a shot. At the end of the day, the most I can do is find schools with a good fit and be the best applicant they can. My grades are what they are. Sigh...

Thank you for the reply, guys! My dilemma is Master's funding :/ With the job market the way it is, I simply cannot afford to go without at least some funding. I don't know if this makes a difference, but in the middle of my transcript I left school for a full year, and since returning I have a 3.35 in the most recent 60 credit hours (and all A's in my most recent semester of 18 credits.) Would this be something they would consider?

Hi, so I'm looking to apply to English Lit programs (subfield being Victorian lit and empire) for Fall of 2012. This means I'll be applying in October-December 2011. I currently go to a non-ranked school that few people have ever heard of, although there are faculty from very prestigious schools who think I have a shot at a high-ranking program. The biggest issue with my transcript is that I outright failed my sophomore year of college, followed by a semester of withdrawals. None of the F's or W's were in English classes, and I left school for a year then returned, declared an English major, and have a 3.2 in English so far. My professors don't seem to be concerned that this will highly affect me, mainly because from my transcript it appears that I left, got my act together, and came back. One has commented that I have an "upward trend" that will be reassuring to adcomms. That said, because of the year of F's, I probably will have a 2.8 - 3.0 upon graduating. I am addressing the issue in my SOP (the cause of the F's was a year long illness followed by a hospitalization) but my concern is that top programs will refuse to consider my transcript based on the GPA. Sorry for the novel, but to get to my question: For those of you who have low GPA's or GRE scores, is the rumor that SOP/recommendations > numbers really true, or does this apply for GPA's that aren't stellar but still meet the requirements? Given that the majority of my grades are several years in the past, will this be something that affects my application still? Most importantly, should I bother applying to high-ranking programs? Thanks in advance for any insight you can give me.