margarets

I'm curious to know why you would play with fire like this. If you don't confess, this will hang over you for the rest of your career, which is an extremely stressful way to live. If you do confess, you will probably lose the offer. Your credibility and reputation will be shot, and it's doubtful any professors would want to work with you. Whereas you could have just told the whole truth, warts and all, and possibly still gotten the offer. So, what was your rationale back when you made the choice to mispresent yourself?

Thanks! UnlikelyGrad, I like your handle! I feel a bit better about things now. The university prides itself on being accessible to mid-career people, and mid-career people have histories, so maybe my application will be unremarkable for some long-ago hiccups. I'm going keep on with the continuing ed courses (they will be good prep for the master's, and are useful in their own right), and make sure I ace those, so that "who I am now" is an academic contender. Yes!

Some background: I'm in my mid-40s, planning to apply for a Master's program for Fall 2013. It's a part-time program that I would do while working full-time. My story: Back in 1986 I left high school and started at a big-name university. I had been a good, scholarship-winning student in high school but at uni I… bombed. I mean, I barely scraped through. Mostly Cs, a few Bs, and even 2 Ds (a D+ and a D- to be exact). And a couple of withdrawals. There was some seriously toxic family stuff going on at the time (an escalation of the perpetually dysfunctional dynamic) and I was an emotional wreck. Looking back, I see that it was worse than I even realized at the time. Anyway, after 3 years full-time but a few credits shy of my degree (you could get 3-year BAs back then), I decided to take a year off to figure out my life. During that year I conceived the notion of becoming a translator, so in the Fall of 1990 I went to another university to study a foreign language. After a semester I realized it wasn't for me and bailed. However, academically I did better: 4 Bs and 2 Cs, and I could transfer some credits back to my first uni. I picked up the last two credits I needed part-time while working full-time, and graduated in 1992. I was 24 years old. For the next couple of years I worked, but in my own time became very interested in a particular topic and did some community activism stuff on it. Then I figured out that I could *work* in that field if I got the necessary education. So I started at a third university for another bachelor's degree. This was one of the best decisions of my life. I really came into my own during this time, and it showed in my academic performance. My first semester GPA was 3.33 and it kept climbing, up to 3.78 in my last semester. (It would have been higher were it not for all the group work in the program. I always seemed to get stuck with the, shall we say, less hard-working and committed students. But anyway.) I graduated with distinction, won a couple of awards, got hired as a teaching assistant for a statistics course and as a research assistant for a very high-profile project led by two of my professors. I was listed as one of the authors and that paper has been cited many times, so it was kind of a big deal, at the time. This program offered an exchange semester overseas in second year, and I went. That university had a very wonky grading system (neither letter grades nor GPA) and my grades were mixed: everything from an A+ to a C- (rough equivalent). My home university did not convert these grades or use them to calculate my GPA, but just gave neutral, non-graded credit for the semester. (However I would still submit the transcript from the overseas university with my Master's application. They want to see everything.) For the 10+ years since, I've worked (including a few years overseas), lived life and pursued non-academic interests. Last year, in preparation for possibly returning to school, I took a continuing education course in a related field. I got an A. That info would also be submitted with my application. Bear in mind that there will be no place in the SOP to discuss my early academic failures. The admissions info is very clear about what they want to see in the SOP and none of it is personal history stuff. So, what they'll see is transcripts from four universities for two bachelor's degrees, with grades going back over 20 years, with no context or explanation. What will the admissions committee think? "Yikes, look at all those Cs and Ds, we can't let this person in" or "meh, those Cs and Ds are from 20 years ago, they've certainly redeemed themselves since" or (with any luck) even "you gotta respect anyone who bombs that badly and still comes back for another try – that's perservance!". I am aware that the other parts of the application are important too, but there's no getting around the fact that grades are a huge deal. And I have gotten every. single. grade. there is to get. What do you all think?