<p>Hi, I am going into my senior year of college next fall with a rather low gpa as a chemistry major. However, I am now 26 and my gpa is this low because from the age of 18-22 I went to school and did terrible. In the past 5 semesters I have taken 64 credits and I have earned a 3.28 GPA. This spring semester I received a 3.8 GPA. The last three semester I have had a 3.46 GPA taking 44 credits. I don't come from a top ranking university, but what are my chances at MIT, Caltech, ITT tech, Harvard, Northwestern and Oxford? Just kidding, obviously I can't get into any of these schools!!! Really though, do you think chemistry or chemical engineering schools will look past my poor performance from when I was younger? I am not aiming for top programs. Just any decent program I can get a TA or research position at. Thanks for reading!</p>
<p>Graduate schools pay attention to trends - and more recent coursework is weighted more heavily. In fact, some programs only consider the last two years of undergraduate work.</p>
<p>Concentrate on keeping up your current performance and pursue research opportunities with your professors. That will be much more productive and worthwhile than worrying about 5-year-old grades :)</p>
<p>I hope you mean Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) not “ITT tech” which is a for-profit.</p>
<p>Anyway, @polarscribe is correct, graduate programs look at your entire application, including letters of reference and they put more emphasis on the upper division courses you have taken more recently. In my experience, it is not unusual to see a student who has done poorly in a first attempt at college come back and do very well as a more mature person. My colleagues in Chemistry at IIT are always looking for highly motivated domestic students as TAs.</p>
Hey, how did everything work out?