Fear of Grad School Admission

[ronny3050]

Hello all!

This is my first post on this forum and to be honest, I am freaking out a little bit. I would like explain a little bit of my situation and let you all know what my dreams are. I greatly appreciate anyone willing to spend their precious time to read this and to help me out.

I will be a senior this fall and I have a gpa of 3.55/4.0 (but it might go a tad bit lower due to poor grades). I do have a publication in a journal and a conference and am in the process of working with another professor throughout summer to hopefully yield another publication. I will giving my GRE this July. I am majoring in CS and minoring in Math and 'Game Design and Development'. 

I am extremely interested in academics and especially in the field of Computer Vision and AI as a whole. My dream is to get straight into a PhD program in a very good CS school like Carnegie Mellon or MIT, however, my biggest fear is the lack of a strong GPA will bring me down.

I am worried sick and I know that the classes ahead of me will only bring my gpa down. I am unsure how much my research experience is going to help with my application or if they won't even see all that after just taking a look at my gpa.

Once more, I greatly appreciate anyone trying to help me and I thank you for your time and patience.

[cs_phd]

GPA is just one criterion. 3.55 is a decent GPA and you don't have to worry. You are in a good situation to get good reco letters from professor you are working under. If you get 3 good letters from professors and if you maintain your GPA around 3.5 there is nothing to fear. Recommendation letters from reputed professors helps a lot. Research experience helps and you need to sell that in your SOP and mention that you are very much passionate about research. There are other good schools in top 10 as well for CV and AI like WashU, UMass Amherst, UMich, UPenn etc. You can try those as well. They are good for CV and AI. 

[ronny3050]

Thank you so much for your quick reply! It has helped me a lot and I feel a lot better now.

Just to reiterate, they WILL look at other criterion and not just solely base it off my GPA?  I will definitely try and sell my SOP using the research angle as this is what I intend to do.

Thank you for letting me know of other good schools for CV and I will definitely apply to them. In your opinion, I do have a chance to get accepted in at least one of the schools you mentioned? Also, will I be competing with Master's students for a PhD admission or will they consider jumping from BS to PhD a separate track? If the former, then do you think having 3 publications is good enough?

 

[gorki]

Hey Ronny,

 

As cs_phd has written, GPA is just one of many thing they look for, and probably one of the less important: there might be a cut-off based on GRE/GPA, but after that, what counts is reference letters, research experience (including publications), and statement of purpose (mostly for fit with prof/department).

 

You will be competing with master's students for phd spots, but  the admin committees take in account the years spent in graduate school already when evaluating research potential...depending on the venues/first authorship, 3 publications coming out of BS is very good to excellent! 

 

By the way, cs_phd is right in saying there are other good programs in the field outside of big 4, you should look at it by advisors rather than programs -- you probably want to discuss with your undergraduate profs/LoR writers and grad students in your field if you have access to them about the reputation of different potential advisors before applying. 

 

Good luck with the applications!

[ronny3050]

Thank you gorki!

This has cleared up a lot of my doubts and I will continue to strive to maintain my GPA and will definitely look at other schools. "you should look at it by advisors rather than programs" makes a lot more sense. I will look into professors mainly involved in CV, in particular, vehicular vision. Do you think it is a good idea to contact them prior to sending my application?




 

[velua]

3 publications is quite strong, and the LORs are the most important thing, but you should still try to get your GPA up. Definitely above 3.6, try to get closer to 3.7 if you can. Sure GPA isn't the only thing, but the top schools will have their choice of students and they're going to choose the guy with 3 publications, excellent LORs, and 3.8 GPA over the guy with 3 publications, excellent LORs, and 3.55 GPA more often than not. You can look for student profiles at your target schools though. Some of them will have a CV on their page (or a linkedin page), and some of those people will include undergrad GPA, even GRE scores. Maybe you can get an idea of what else the 3.5-3.6 GPA students had to do to get in.

[ronny3050]

Thank you velua. After reading through I realize the issue, but I fear that I wouldn't be able to raise my GPA high enough because I only have the summer semester to work on it.
This is so unfortunate but I will try my best. I have looked into a few people at these universities and it is true that they have their GPA on their CVs.
I am going to keep looking for schools that match best for what I intend to do and the GPA scale.

[velua]

Some schools have deadlines after your fall grades are out, and even if not, they likely won't start reviewing apps until after Christmas, so you can rush in a new transcript if you pull up your GPA a bit. Just deal with the GRE this summer so you don't have any distractions (unless you want to take a subject test).

[ronny3050]

Thank you velua. You've helped me a lot and I am so grateful to all of you for replying.