<p>Recently I was hired for a spring co-op with an automotive company as a mechanical engineering sophomore.</p>
<p>The co-op ends in mid-late April instead of the typical August, so I've been considering looking to work for a different company that has a much more different culture during the summer.</p>
<p>The only issue is that my 3.54 GPA is most likely going to drop to around 3.4 or even 3.3, partially due to slightly underestimating the first midterms' difficulty and then having to do two interviews the week before the finals week. </p>
<p>I am very likely to receive two Cs and two Bs in my four courses (dropped a gen-ed early in the semester to make time for a part-time programming job).</p>
<p>Doing paperwork, researching the companies that wanted to interview and then the actual interviews occupied a significant amount of available studying time for my finals.</p>
<p>It could affect your future internships. Depends on the companies you are applying to. A 3.4 or even a 3.3 GPA is good, not stellar, but good. However, some large companies (like the one I retired from) get a lot of resumes for internships. The ad said 3.0 required but many years HR would raise the level to around 3.4 just to get the stack of resumes to a reasonable size. Those that did get internships would have GPAs over 3.5 or so and many times some other kind of hook. Of course, the company was a desirable one to work for and many other companies won’t have such high standards.</p>
<p>Do realize that underestimating the midterm’s difficulty was totally within your control and you shouldn’t use it as an excuse. Also, interviews should not consume that much time that they should affect your grades. As a student and certainly as a professional engineer, you will asked to estimate your work load and get accomplished what needs to be done. It should not be used as an excuse.</p>
<p>I had at least 8 pages of paperwork to complete for one of the interviews. I probably spent a full day (evening for the paperwork, research, and preparation; morning for the two interviews).</p>
<p>Nevertheless, I won’t be using that as an excuse for my drop in GPA.</p>
<p>How much did your company value prior co-op/internship experiences?</p>
<p>Even a full day (or maybe even two???) should not have much of an effect on your grades unless you want it to.</p>
<p>Having had an internship was good but we didn’t value it a whole lot over other similar experiences. A senior project that had some depth to it was equally good experience. What we were looking for was a person’s ability to work with others in a team environment. It was a large company with large engineering projects. These projects always involved many engineers working together. I would ask the applicant what his/her role on the project or the internship was? And how that work was integrated into the project as a whole. If possible, I would always try and get one of the applicant’s references be someone that they worked with on that project/internship.</p>
<p>FYI, in an interview I would also ask some technical questions that I thought one should be able to answer and maybe one or two that you probably didn’t have the background to answer. I wanted to see if you could answer the questions that you should have and see if you could admit that you didn’t know the ones beyond your capability. Trying to BS me would not go ever well at all. But I did rely primarily on your grades as a measure of your technical ability, which is why GPA is so important.</p>