Please oh please rate my profile

[humanist]

UG: Mid-range university of california

GPA: 3.2 overall (3.74 at UC, 2.9 at cc.. i graduated from UC with minimum possible units)

GRE: 1420 total (v:660 q:760 a:4.5)

Enrolled and withdrew from law school (ranked mid tier 1)

U.S. House of Representatives Internship, legal writer at immigration firm for 1 year, research aide for energy company for summer before law school.

I'm only applying to UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Santa Cruz as you can see in my signature. Is there any hope for me?

[CatallaxisOfEvil]

It'll come down to the strength of your recommender's letters and how strong your own personal statement is. They'll need to kick ass to outweigh your GPA, which on its own isn't enough to recommend you for research work or graduate level study.

But you have very impressive GRE results, which should get your application looked at carefully just about anywhere. Your 'real world' experience should also serve you well, depending on the disposition of the admissions committee. So add in decent SOP and letters (and, these days, a bucketful of luck) and I would be very surprised if you didn't get in to one of those at least.

Good luck!

[Lex]

Honestly, I don't think anyone on this forum should definitively raise or dash your hopes. Maybe your GPA in your major is high; maybe there were extraneous reasons that your grades were low that you can explain in your statement of purpose; maybe your recommenders will explain that your grades were low for X reason, but you were actually the most brilliant discussion participant in the class. Maybe your recommenders are buddies with someone at one of the places you're applying. Who knows?

[TimeWaster]

Newbie here, but been reading a lot of the posts of late. I agree with the first reply, SOP and LOR man. It all comes down to that if your GPA ain't the highest and GRE is slightly better than average. Even if GPA + GRE are high, as you can see in many of the discussions before this one, SOP and LOR still carry greater weight. Looking at your GRE it's not too bad, so don't worry too much if your SOP and LOR are good.

[expatbayern]

GPA: 3.2 overall (3.74 at UC, 2.9 at cc..

I think a lot of schools will be willing to ignore your community college grades and look at your university ones as representative--one of my advisors says that when he serves on adcomms, he looks for an applicant to have just one semester/quarter where they do really well in higher-level courses, and if he sees that, he figures they can make it in grad school (regardless of the rest of their grades). If there are issues that caused the lower grades early on and better ones later, you may want to cover those in your SOP or have your letter-writers mention them, even if it's just that you got a lot more excited about school and political science once you moved from doing general ed requirements at comm coll to taking specialized, challenging courses at university.

[humanist]

Gahh it's looking ugly. No word from Irvine yet and they seem to have already sent out their admit emails/phonecalls. My heart rate has gotten a little faster.