<p>I know its impossible to say for sure if I'll get in somewhere or not, I'm just curious as to whether or not I'm in the ballpark for some of these schools. Right now I'm a junior:</p>
<p>cumulative GPA: 3.37
engineering/math/science GPA: 3.32
GRE: haven't taken yet, but let's guess 760
2 years undergraduate research in a chemistry professors lab
3 solid LORs, 2 probably on par with other admitted students, 1 very solid one from the professor I worked for, none of them are famous, but they all have published a fair amount.</p>
<p>So will I have a shot at:</p>
<p>Penn State
Pitt
Carnegie Mellon
Virginia Tech
RPI
Texas
Texas A&M
Florida
Johns Hopkins
USC</p>
<p>I realize thats a wide range of schools, but I'm just trying to get a rough feel for things at this point. Thoughts? Thanks!</p>
<p>I think it is weak…
The gpa is really low and you would need to score higher than 760 quant to make that up. You have time to raise the gpa and have a good junior/senior year gpa. I assume 1 rec is from the professor you worked with. Is he publishing in good journals? Are you author on any of the papers? Not to be mean, but unless the other recs come from people who you have worked with in terms of research they are probably below par as research recs have a higher value.</p>
<p>I’d second sarbruis statement and elaborate with an explanation.</p>
<p>A quick look at average gpas of the programs at those institution would suffice. Considering that any applicant below this will have either extremely good LOR or publications to counteract the low gpa your application does not seem that competitive for a PhD while it might be for a masters.</p>
<p>Now it does come down to fit with department and supervisor as well as if they happen to know any of your LOR writers but I’d say weak-very weak for PhD wouldn’t be very inaccurate.</p>
<p>i went to texas’s open house for chemE two weeks ago. they said that the median gpa of all the recruits was 3.8 and the average GRE score was 1440.</p>
<p>It’s probably shortsighted to attempt to judge chances based simply on GPA. However, the fact is that your engineering/math/science GPA is on the low side - so you’ll want to make that up somehow, preferably with stellar research, stellar LORs (especially from your PI), a stellar personal statement/statement of purpose, and a stellar GRE Quant score (preferably 780 or above). You can also try taking more advanced engineering/math/science courses and getting good grades in those.</p>
<p>Question: Have you been consistently pulling term e/m/s GPAs in the ballpark of 3.32 from freshman year to your current year, or are you pulling 3.9-4.0 e/m/s term GPAs now but did badly in your freshman year? If it’s the latter you don’t have much to worry about - just explain in your personal statement why you got off to a rocky start and/or how you learned from that and improved yourself.</p>