I am a super un-rounded individual.
Currently a senior at an ivy institution studying engineering and applied sciences
I am sitting on a 3.95/4 for my major specific courses… (total of 13 courses)
-that being said…
my overall is a stifling 3.2/4 (all these sociology courses that my friends told me were easy A’s were my worst grades…)
Do grad schools look at the well rounded nature of the individual? or is passion, drive and brilliance in my field more important? I am fairly confident in my ability to excel in research, my field comes naturally to me and I can easily come up with and carry out experiments…
No, they do not look for well-rounded individuals. Particularly for academic/research programs, they are looking for individuals with passion and drive and ability in a specific area of expertise, and your job in grad school is to specialize. So if you want a PhD or an MS in engineering, nobody is going to care about your sociology courses (unless you failed a lot of them) - your 3.95 in the major is what matters.
The answer is slightly different if you are trying to go to a professional program like an MBA or an MPP or something like that. It’s more nuanced. They might care, a bit.
They care about your ability to succeed in that program. Particularly in PhD programs, they are looking for people who will potentially go on to do great research in the field. So they don’t really seem to care if you played in orchestra for 14 years or were the captain of your club rugby team. Research is the extracurricular that matters.
Thanks for the comments,
talked with a couple of professors/colleagues and i’ve come to conclude that having such a low overall GPA is not ideal and at best I’ll be picked as a wild card.
(the schools I applied to are all top tier schools and apparently all the applicants have good overall AND major GPA)
I think I’ll start looking for jobs in the event none of the graduate programs are interested in me
I think that it isn’t ideal but it isn’t a deal breaker. Especially when the major classes are stronger. (Wouldn’t you have learned after the first sociology class not to keep doing it?) But your research experience can really make all the difference anyway If you really want grad school, you should be able to find a decent one, which may be just as well if a tippy top one doesn’t pan out. And of course you would like a good GRE even on the verbal. I read something from a CS prof who said that the students he noticed who did well scored well on the verbal as well as the math, although the math is ostensibly the one that matters to the engineering type grad schools look at.
The answer is no, adcoms don’t generally care about being well rounded. However, there is often a GPA low point you have to be above to get to the committee stage, and that’s usually around 3.5. There are many exceptions, of course, people with excellent research experience, applicants who are recommended by relevant and respected PIs, additional postbac coursework, or even just catching the right program at the right year. It’s already a crapshoot, so apply and see. Your strong major GPA might make your application very valuable in the right hands.
I think when I applied to graduate schools my overall GPA was about 3.2 but my GPA within my major was something like 3.8. I didn’t get into all of the top schools, but I got into a handful of top 25 programs and one or two top 10 programs with that. Of course, having research experience helped out. I, too, applied for a few jobs just in case, though. I ended up in graduate school.