<p>Many employers actually do care about which university you attend, to an extent. I would not have received my offer if I went to my local city’s university, both because my current school is a target school and because I most likely wouldn’t have learned as much (all universities are most definitely not always equal in terms of educational quality). I’m only speaking from my limited experience - the summer classes I took for fun at a different school for the same major were utterly terrible.</p>
<p>There are always exceptions, and you still need to work hard/coast on talent to succeed, regardless of university.</p>
<p>Don’t worry about GPA so much - it’s not important after a certain number (depends on your school) [UNLESS you want to go to grad school]. You don’t need an extremely high GPA. You better be able to demonstrate you know your sh.t, though.</p>
<p>Edit: I assume you mean clubs/etc by extracurricular activities. Internships and outside projects related to your major (e.g. OSS) are so important, and you shouldn’t neglect those.</p>
<p>In my application experience, the employers didn’t care where you went to school, but they did focus their recruitment on specific schools, so it was a bit of a self selecting process. As far as GPA goes, I graduated with a 3.12 GPA, and I’m doing just fine.</p>
<p>To clarify, also, I don’t advise doing activities in order to impress employers. I joined clubs in college and attained leadership positions because I loved the groups and wanted to give back. It actually wasn’t until October when I went to my career services coordinator and was told that the experience I had in my campus groups was worth putting on a resume (prior I had just put my work experience). None of the companies who interviewed me cared at ALL about my GPA once I stepped into the interview room.</p>
<p>I’d say that you stick to moderation. A 3.8 is nice, but only indicates that you know how to study – which <em>is</em> important, but sometimes not enough.</p>
<p>ECs make you appear to be more well rounded as a person. The employer/interview can see from the GPA that you are a studious, hardworking student. The activities you participate in, however, indicate that you actually have passions and interests. People want to hire hardworking people that can socially connect with the rest of the working team.</p>
<p>It sounds like the OP can’t/doesn’t want to manage both a decent GPA + ECs, and thus wants to focus just on his studies. I think that’s perfectly valid for engineering. It’s far, far more important to actually know your material/industry well, and far, far less important to be able to list a bunch of “leadership” activities, especially if you don’t really care about them. Internships (not ECs) are great because you can usually do them during the summer, so they won’t really interfere with your schoolwork (they’ll probably make schoolwork seem easier, depending on your internship and major).</p>
<p>Honestly, most of the ECs I’ve seen fellow <em>engineering</em> students (in real life) list sound just okay, and I wouldn’t think any more (or less) of them in terms of their ability to perform their jobs because of these. I’d pay much more attention to the interviews + prior experience (academic experience counts, IMO).</p>
<p>This is all in the context of people joining ECs just to prove something to employers, though. Joining one for enjoyment is definitely good.</p>