Initiative

[yehk]

Currently in the waiting game just like everyone else, but I just got off Skype with my uncle who was asking me about my applications. I totally forgot that he happens to be a Professor Emeritus at Umich - he was telling me about how he has been given a few applications to read this season, "but i don't read that many because they are boring!" Following this comment, he launched into a story about how the main thing for him is that students "catch [his] eye" in some way or another. He told me that he once had an applicant who had a GPA of 2.8 - and the department only accepts people with a 3.5 and above (or back in the day, anyway). He said that the one thing about this student was that he took the initiative and paid a visit to my uncle in Michigan to convince him of why he should be a candidate. He told my uncle that the reason why he had a bad GPA was because he hadn't got his act together for the first couple years in college, but snapped out of it in his final year and knuckled down, so his first years at college pulled his GPA down. (I'm not at a US college so I'm assuming that's how cumulative GPAs work...) Anyway despite his GPA, he was an "impressive candidate", and my uncle subsequently convinced the department to accept him, and gave him a fellowship. Randomly, my uncle also loves football and the student had the same name as a famous American quarterback...... go figure. (To me it actually does feel like sometimes an application depends on whether the person reading it had eggs for breakfast or not and is therefore having a good day.)

Needless to say, the guy got in and turned out to be my uncle's top student, and is now head of a multi-million-dollar company.

Just a nice little story to pass time.

[johndiligent]

Wow. I'm kind of hoping that my sub-par GPA has worked like that: makes me stand out a little bit from the cookie-cutter perfect profile. In my dreams, at least!