What if I don't meet the required 3.0 for last two years of coursework?

[boopiter]

Should I even bother?  Seriously, this is freaking me out.  I'm graduating after next term (fall 2013) and I just calculated my last 90 units of coursework and I have a 2.95!  I did something really stupid and took all my chemistry classes during these years.  Turns out I'm TERRIBLE at chem and this really brought down my gpa.  My cumulative is 3.14, major is 3.45.  I have 2 years of research experience (my own personal project for which I was flown to an annual conference to present and will soon be submitting for publication).  I also have interships/volunteer experience and a stellar letter of reccomendation from my advisor of my research.  I have 4 interviews lined up with potential grad shcool advisors, one of which is at UW (my top choice) and I've had a good word put in for me by both my advisor and her close colleague whom I met at the conference I attended.  I'm really worried, though, that all of these things won't even be looked at and my app will be tossed out during the initial screening screening for gpa.  What should I do?  I haven't taken the gre's yet, so I can't speak of my score, but I'm studying my buns off and will be taking them in the next couple months.  Any advice?  Thanks! 

[Eigen]

I wouldn't worry about your app being tossed in initial screening, I'd worry about it having trouble at the University level approval stage towards the end.

 

There's not a lot you can do other than apply and see, sadly- some schools are just stickier about minimums than others, and some departments have more pull to get the school to bend on requirements than others. 

[boopiter]

Hello Eigen!  Thank you so much for your response!  What do you mean by university level approval stage?  The way I understand how it works (read: the way I made up in my head) is that there is a general university application comittee that does preliminary scans and throws out applications like mine.  Then the apps that have met the minimum requiremements are sent to the departments for the departmental comittee to read the letters and statements and make the comparisons.  Is that not the way it works?  Are you saying I wont be automatically tossed out for not meeting a minimum requirement?  Also, what if I have an advisor that wants to take me?  Will that make any difference?  I'm already speaking to potential advisors in hopes that they'll get a good feel for who I am and my research goals/intentions before I apply.

[rising_star]

boopiter, what you've described sounds more like the way undergrad admissions works. At the graduate level, your applications goes directly to the department where an internal admissions committee decides on applicants. Then, those selected for admission are forwarded on to the graduate school for admission. So, what Eigen is saying is that the department could choose to offer you admission but then you could ultimately be denied admission by the graduate school on the basis of your GPA.

[boopiter]

Hmm.  Well, I haven't graduated yet.  I still have one more term, but since it's fall term I do have the rest of the year (potentially) that I could use to retake some classes and pull my gpa up.  The only problem then is that I will have already sent in my transcripts with the low gpa.  How would I show them that my graduating gpa meets the minimum?  Is there a way to do this or would I have to wait and reapply for the 2015 year? 

[juilletmercredi]

There is no way if you are applying in Fall 2014, because quite frankly, you don't know that yet.  You're assuming that you can pull your GPA up to a 3.0 for the last 60 credits, and you probably can - but unless your application deadline is after when your school returns your grades for fall semester, you can't show them that.

 

But seriously, stop agonizing over it.  You can't change your GPA right now; it is what it is.  Don't let that deter you from applying - apply anyway.  You never know what will happen.  And if you do get declined, you can apply again for Fall 2015.  But don't shortchange yourself now over .05 of a point.  Unless that's a graduate school minimum, most departments have a little flexibility in their requirements.

[danieleWrites]

There are two kinds of GPA, overall and in your major. Like Eigen and rising said, the graduate school itself will usually have a minimum GPA they'll accept. If you don't meet that GPA, you may have to fix it somehow.

 

If you have to increase your GPA to get where you want, you should go speak to your current adviser first to find out your options. If you're close enough to the minimum GPA at the schools you're looking at, it might behoove you to double major and take another couple of semesters as an undergrad to bring your GPA up. That would also give you the opportunity to retake some of the chemistry courses for a better grade, as well. You might want to stick around for another semester and retake those chemistry courses without adding another major. You do have options. That might be a waste of time and.or money for you. I don't know your circumstances or what you need to do to do better in chemsitry. I do know that once you graduate, you can't retake classes to improve a grade, even if you return for a second bachelor's. I had to eat a D in a literature course because I assumed I could just retake the class when I went for my second BA in English after I'd already graduated with a BA in sociology (English was my minor). That tanked my GPA in both overall and in major. I squeaked into my MA program, and got my GPA up enough to get into my dream PhD program. So, the point is to find out all of your options, including what you can do to improve your GPA now, before you graduate, It might mean putting grad school off for a year.

 

I also think that you should talk to your adviser about the chemistry thing and how it might affect you as a grad student. I'm not a biologist, so I have no idea how much chemistry factors into your field, other than the fact that it does and that it factors more in some emphases than it does in others. Your adviser has been through the PhD process in your field, so he/she could give you a more realistic idea of how weak chemistry skills will affect your ability to succeed in graduate school. Some of the people here could answer that. It might not mean anything, but, logically speaking, if you're required to take chem as part of a biology curriculum, then chem is probably necessary in some way. Every undergraduate biology program I've looked at requires at least organic chem (my kid just started a biology program, so I've looked at a few).

[TakeruK]

Hello Eigen!  Thank you so much for your response!  What do you mean by university level approval stage?  The way I understand how it works (read: the way I made up in my head) is that there is a general university application comittee that does preliminary scans and throws out applications like mine.  Then the apps that have met the minimum requiremements are sent to the departments for the departmental comittee to read the letters and statements and make the comparisons.  Is that not the way it works?  Are you saying I wont be automatically tossed out for not meeting a minimum requirement?  Also, what if I have an advisor that wants to take me?  Will that make any difference?  I'm already speaking to potential advisors in hopes that they'll get a good feel for who I am and my research goals/intentions before I apply.

 

 

rising_star already answered the first part of your question -- i.e. department committee gets your application first, the graduate school/university level committee only sees those vetted by the department. At this stage, admission is all but a formality except in cases where the school might have a hard cut-off in GPA, or TOEFL score, or GRE score etc. But as others said, sometimes the department can convince the University to bend the rules for you (one of the best pieces of advice I got about academia is that almost all rules can be bent). 

 

As for your other questions, I think it's unlikely that any application will be automatically tossed out. Whether or not having an advisor that wants to take you will really depend on how that department works. At one place I attended, the formal departmental admissions committee doesn't do much work other than forward relevant applications to each prof. It's completely up to each prof to accept you to work with them, so it's more like a job hunting process. This is more common in Canada and I know one school where you can only get an offer if at least one professor says "Yes I will fund this student for the length of their degree". When you get your offer letter, it will tell you which profs have offered to fund you and you would have to select which one to work with if you accept their offer. In these cases, the admissions committee will serve also as a secondary check to provide a bit of oversight on who "hires" whom. However, in many other schools, especially at US programs like mine, there is a departmental admissions committee that simply selects the top X candidates to admit to the school and we worry about who we want to work with later. To ensure that there is funding in place though, the department provides the funding for the first year to all students, and one prof in the department has to be willing to commit to funding our second year. This is the minimum time we have to spend at this school though, since if we don't pass our qualifying exam sometime in year 2, then we will leave at the end of year 2 with a Masters degree. Here, the advisors all have plenty of funding so if an advisor is unwilling to fund us past year 2, it's probably because our work is not satisfactory and it will be unlikely for us to pass the qualifying exam! 

 

So overall, yes I think you should continue speaking to your potential advisors. In some cases it could help, but in others, it might not if your potential advisor isn't involved with the admissions process. In my opinion, the main limiting factor in admitting graduate students is the amount of resources available (money and time of advisors) to train the graduate student. So, this is why I think getting into grad school really means convincing someone or some entity (i.e. a department) that you are worth the investment of time and money. You can do this with GPA, but they will look at the whole package -- reputation, LORs, proven research record, etc. My advice would be to not get too fixated on any one aspect like your GPA or GRE, and apply anyways with the "invest in me!" mindset!! Good luck