GPA important for an engineer?

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>dallas808, but I'm sure your company regularly uses GPA as a factor in simply granting interviews to potential undergrads, no? What I meant was that GPA was more something that will open doors initially - of course things will even out in the end. In 15 years all people will see is what degree you got and from where - maybe someone will ask for your GPA, but I'd think they'd be much more interested in actual work you've done since college. So by evening out, those that all of the sudden (with "real life" on the line) start working harder in their job than they did in school but maybe didn't get the greatest starting position in the world will eventually get to where they want to be. </p>

<p>Still though, for the whole point of the thread, I don't see why anyone would aim for an "average" GPA. To each his own, I guess, and if you end up with a 3.1 after trying your hardest then fine, but don't be the person that is capable of a 3.6 who takes his/her aptitude forgranted and gets that 3.1. So "aiming" for a certain GPA should really be irrelevant, at least the way I look at it. Do your best in each class you take, and you can know (whether you are a 4.0 student at MIT or a 2.9 at a mid-ranked state school) you at least did your best and put yourself in the best position possible following graduation.</p>

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<p>Go to bed!</p>

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<p>Alas. I guess all you folks are just smarter than I am. I think I got a 3.0 in one semester. Everything else was a B-. (I think that sounds better, don't you?)</p>

<p>For the record, I don't have much unemployment on my resume. (Quite the opposite over the past 30 years.)</p>

<p>As for today's job market, I can state with certainty that a sub-3.0 GPA will get plenty of interviews and job offers. As Scrubs pointed out, a good internship and appropriate course-work will overcome much of a GPA deficiency. Sure, there are HR gatekeepers. And, a GPA below 3.0 will likely have to work extra hard to get past them. But the situation is not hopeless. There are opportunities for us small-brained engineers.</p>

<p>And, beyond graduation, well, have you heard the phrase "the first shall be last and the last shall be first"? It describes the real world.</p>

44

<p>we are talking about engineering major gpa, right?</p>

45

<p>That depends. For where I used to work, it's both.</p>

46

<p>We're all talking about overall GPA within an engineering curriculum. If you did particularly well on a portion of your curriculum, it behooves you to call it out. Likewise, if there were extenuating circumstances on a less-than-stellar GPA, it also behooves you to point that out (e.g. working 40 hrs/wk to put yourself through school while working on an engineering degree). Whatever your situation, you should relentlessly strive to achieve the highest GPA possible.</p>

<p>As much as our colleague from Cornell would like to think that school name recognition and GPA are going to get him his first job and that those will be pertinant after the first job, it's simply not the case in most instances. Having a high GPA and/or being in a top-ranked school will make it easier to get in front of an interviewer, but will not absolve you from having to make a case that you have some skill or attribute that the company needs.</p>

<p>My company (a $5B international company) regularly schedules interviews at only three schools in the country, MIT being one of them. I can guarantee you that less than 1% of our 30K+ employees are from those select locations. About 50% get in by going through HR. The rest of us get in by varying amounts of experience, networking, and audacity. </p>

<p>A few of us are hired because of what school we went to or what our GPA was. Most of us - despite of it.</p>

47

<p>
[quote]
Having a high GPA and/or being in a top-ranked school will make it easier to get in front of an interviewer, but will not absolve you from having to make a case that you have some skill or attribute that the company needs.

[/quote]

Very well said!</p>

<p>What I am about to say probably just repeats what any good career service department will tell their graduates so just bear with me. </p>

<p>A little backgrounder. When I was with Fortune 100 company ($30B+ revenue, 100K+ employees), I was usually the 2nd last (or the last) guy a candidate would meet before an offer is made. Prior to that, most candidates had to survive at least one on-campus interview and one on-site interview. </p>

<p>First of all, most larger companies/firms have well-developed hiring processes for different groups. E.g. mine has three "front-door" processes - one for on-campus recruiting (including MS graduates), another for those interned/co-oped with us, and a separate one for MBAs/PhDs. Each process has it own set of selection criteria, presentation, interviewing experience and rules for the obvious reasons. There is usually a cutoff GPA around 3.0 (I think we raise it to 3.2-3.5 for a few schools where grade inflation is well known). Bottom line, the company is most interested at the upper half of the pool.</p>

<p>If a candidate's GPA is below the cutoff point, it's up to the candidate to find ways selling his/her case. A few very resourceful ones figured out what I would call the the "side doors" that directly lead a candidate to the hiring manager. Hint: alums. Frankly, I think most of our external hiring (the very experience ones) came through the side doors. </p>

<p>I am pretty sure GPA is NOT a factor beyond the cutoff round. The candidates came before me with a wide range of GPAs. Sometime I scratched my head wondering how someone with a "low" GPA came this far before the interview but gave my two thumbs up after meeting the candidate. </p>

<p>What I like the readers to take away is that ask and learn about different processes a company has. Use the one that most favors your particular situation. Do your research and learn to sell yourself. No one owes you a job or a superb offer regardless the reputation of your engineering school or for that matter your 4.0 GPA. No one. </p>

<p>I will close this post with a gentle reminder. It usually takes many years and efforts of countless individual to cultivate a productive relationship between your school and an employer. No matter how displeasant the interviewing/recruiting process or a low offer you got, always maintain your professional image as you - the graduates - are the ones who make or break your school reputation. If you have a particular concern, talk to the director of career service who will know how to get the right message across right way to the hiring company. Our company stopped recruiting all together at one particular top school because of "recurring attitude problems" from students. So please don't be that jerk that ruins it all for people after you.</p>

48

<p>


Well golly! You have me figured out. I always figured I'd just get through here with a high GPA and BAM, instant jobs. INTERVIEWS? I didn't say that a high GPA was good for "opening doors," did I? Naw, I must have said a high GPA = jobs, now and forever. </p>

<p>I'd love to see exactly what you are replying to here.</p>

49

<p>My, my.... don't be so touchy.</p>

<p>Maybe I should have been more to the point. Yes, GPA will help you get you to those first interviews. After you've gotten into a job by a couple of years, it won't matter a bit where you got your degree or what your class rank was - it's whether you've been able to put your knowledge to good use and produce results that affect the bottom line.</p>

<p>Oh, BTW, I was responding to your most recent reply this morning to Dallas808....</p>

50

<p>bumping this up.</p>

51

<p>
[quote]
There is usually a cutoff GPA around 3.0 (I think we raise it to 3.2-3.5 for a few schools where grade inflation is well known). Bottom line, the company is most interested at the upper half of the pool.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>The problem with these GPA cutoffs is that they often times don't account for the competitiveness and skill of the pool in question. For example, I've known Berkeley engineers with GPA's lower than the 3.0 cutoff who couldn't get interviews at companies that they wanted, because the company would rather give an interview from somebody from a CalState who does meet that cutoff. If those Berkeley guys had gone to CalState instead, they probably would have surmounted that cutoff. Similarly, there have been other threads on CC where other students who go to top engineering schools like Michigan or Illinois or Purdue who are having difficulty getting interviews with the companies they want because they don't meet the GPA cutoffs, whereas if they had gone to lesser engineering schools, they might have made it. </p>

<p>Obviously if you go to one of these top engineering schools and do well, your opportunities are vast. But what if you don't do well? In that case, sadly, you probably would have been better off if you had gone to a less strong, but easier school. But, ex-ante, you don't know whether you will do well or not, so going to many of these top engineering schools is a risk.</p>

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<p>sakky are you an engineering major? If yes where do/did you go to school? What year are you, or where do you work? Thanks your post is interesting to me since I have a son still in high school considering engineering.</p>

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<p>First, I don't think it is reasonable to assume everyone who got admitted to top engineering schools will come out with a perfect GPA. However, maintaing a B-average is a very achievable goal under most circumstances. Granted one or two bad semesters could easily drag a solid B+ student to B-/C+ average. That's why in Wisconsin (and, if I am not mistaken, Purdue) only let recruiters prescreen half of the interview slots. So at least half of the slots are open for anyone to sign up. So if you are below-B candidate, you get the same 30-minute chance as everyone. But you better prepare to make full use of every second to sell yourself. </p>

<p>Quite frankly I think most graduates from the top schools will find employment regardless their GPA. So that should be the least of the worry. IMO, the rigorous training one receives at top engineering school is well worth the risks. </p>

<p>collegemon16, there is one particular risk that every prospective student needs to consider before signing up. That is the prospect of losing his/her self confidence when things get rough. I have seen this happens more than once so beware. Good friend's D was a 4.0 HS student, went to MIT and came back with her confidence totally shot (but managed to regain some as she is going through med school).</p>

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<p>Adding my 2 cents:
1) combination of GPA and school reputation
2) Some places, I've heard Google, prefer graduate degree, like Masters and above. And undergraduate in Engineering is so limiting.
3) A great combination Undergraduate EE and MBA( not finance).
4) Watch out for GPA. Some kids transfer from 2 year cc to Big State U like UC Berkeley so the quality of the education is not as great as if they started out as freshman, ie the GPA needs to take into account of this.
For example, I used to interview one girl graduated from UC Berkeley, a great school for engineering, but she was not great, on the resume it did not list she attended community college, just Berkeley which was very deceiving.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
sakky are you an engineering major? If yes where do/did you go to school? What year are you, or where do you work?

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I'm afraid my policy is never to answer these questions publicly. Suffice it to say that there are some people on CC who try to figure out who you are and then try to stalk you in real life. </p>

<p>
[quote]
First, I don't think it is reasonable to assume everyone who got admitted to top engineering schools will come out with a perfect GPA. However, maintaing a B-average is a very achievable goal under most circumstances. Granted one or two bad semesters could easily drag a solid B+ student to B-/C+ average. That's why in Wisconsin (and, if I am not mistaken, Purdue) only let recruiters prescreen half of the interview slots. So at least half of the slots are open for anyone to sign up. So if you are below-B candidate, you get the same 30-minute chance as everyone. But you better prepare to make full use of every second to sell yourself.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>But that just reinforces what I was saying before - that there are some people who went to higher-ranked engineering schools and did poorly such that they would have been better off if they had gone somewhere easier. Even in the scenario you described, only half of the spots are unscreened, and presumably those spots are allocated randomly amongst all who request them. So what if you can't get one of those spots? Counterfactually, if you had gone to an easier school, you might have gotten a spot. </p>

<p>
[quote]
Quite frankly I think most graduates from the top schools will find employment regardless their GPA. So that should be the least of the worry

[/quote]
</p>

<p>The question is not whether they will get * some * engineering job. The question is whether they will get the job they want. I agree that there are plenty of less desirable engineering jobs out there, i.e. with mediocre companies that don't really invest in professional training and development for their employees, in which the work is not particularly inspiring, located in places that people don't really want to work in. So, sure, you can get one of those jobs. The real question is, what is the best way for you to get a highly desirable job - i.e. working with companies that are willing to give you interesting tasks and develop your career? </p>

<p>
[quote]
IMO, the rigorous training one receives at top engineering school is well worth the risks.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Well, this is a confation of 'top' schools with rigorous, difficult training. I admit that I sometimes conflate these two attributes also. But suffice it to say that 'top' engineering schools don't necessarily have to be difficult. A certain school in Palo Alto immediately comes to mind as offering a highly prestigious engineering degree in an atmosphere that is relatively relaxed (compared to other engineering programs). It's practically impossible to actually flunk out of that school, or even to get truly mediocre grades. Yet engineering students from that school seem to be doing quite well for themselves. </p>

<p>But of course the * real * risk is that of not even graduating at all. You generally need a 2.0, both overall, and more importantly, within your technical coursework, to remain in good engineering academic standing in most schools, and certain schools (i.e. Berkeley) are even more stringent by requiring a 2.0 in all of your upper-division engineering coursework. What if you don't have that? Then you're usually placed on academic probation, which puts you on the road to expulsion. I've certainly known quite a few expelled engineers. Plenty of people who get expelled from tough engineering schools would have graduated just fine if they had just gone to an easier school in the first place.</p>

<p>What makes the situation more egregious is that once you've been expelled, or even once you've started to get bad grades, it's difficult for you to transfer to that other, easier school where you might have done well, simply because no school likes to take, as a transfer candidate, a student who did poorly in his previous institution. </p>

<p>To give you an example, say you get admitted to Berkeley and UCDavis, and you choose Berkeley and you do poorly such that you're placed on probation. Now, not only is it difficult for you to graduate from Berkeley. you probably won't even be able to transfer to and graduate from Davis, despite the fact that you actually got into Davis previously. It doesn't matter that you got in previously. What matters is how your performance has been lately, which has been poor. But of course if you had never gone to Berkeley at all, you might not ever have performed poorly in the first place. </p>

<p>Nor do I mean to single out Berkeley. There have been plenty of other stories here on CC of engineering students at Michigan who are doing poorly and probably would have been better off going to an easier school. </p>

<p>The truth of the matter is, engineering salaries don't vary significantly with the prestige of the school. As a case in point, consider the salaries offered to the engineers coming out of Berkeley and San Jose State. While the Berkeley engineers do get higher average salaries, only in one case (industrial engineering or IEOR in Berkeley parlance) do the Berkeley engineers clearly get much higher ave. salaries, and another case (EE), is marginally so. The rest are basically negligible. For example, Berkeley ChemE's made an average of $55969, whereas SJSU ChemE's made $54372, for a difference of less than $1600 a year. That's pretty negligible to me. Similarly, consider ME. SJSU actually has a separate AeroE program, whereas in Berkeley, AeroE is taught as a subfield within ME. Hence, if you combine SJSU's ME and AeroE salaries to form a 'global' ME salary, you will note that they are making basically the same as what the Berkeley ME's are making. </p>

<p><a href="http://career.berkeley.edu/CarDest/2006Majors.stm#salary%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://career.berkeley.edu/CarDest/2006Majors.stm#salary&lt;/a>
<a href="http://careercenter.sjsu.edu/download/SalarySurvey2005to2006.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://careercenter.sjsu.edu/download/SalarySurvey2005to2006.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>The bottom line is that if you study engineering in Berkeley, then unless you're a majoring in IEOR or EE, you're probably not going to be that much better off than if you had just done engineering at SJSU, at least in terms of starting salary. You can talk about the extra rigorous training that Berkeley would provides, and certainly Berkeley has no shortage of rigor, but companies don't really seem to care about that. If they did, you would expect them to pay Berkeley students more. They don't.</p>

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<p>sakky, just how top are you referring to for engineering schools? I am actually more interested at this point in studying engineering at Dartmouth than Harvey Mudd.</p>

<p>This is because I do not necessarily intend to become an engineer; but at the same time, should plans fall through, maybe that's what will happen - is it a bad idea to go to Dart for that?</p>

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<p>If you go ahead to get a Master's degree, does the BS gpa still matter? or is the MS gpa a bigger factor?</p>

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<p>
[quote]
If you go ahead to get a Master's degree, does the BS gpa still matter? or is the MS gpa a bigger factor?

[/quote]

In most cases, your masters GPA (usually pretty good) could make a lower undergrad GPA an non-issue.</p>

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<p>Let me begin by saying one should always set up themselves for success (and not the other way around). In other words, finding a place/environment that you can thrive and excel is a very important first step. E.g. in his book, former GE CEO Jack Welch attributed part of his success because he went to Illinois to get his PhD where he became the top of his class and developed his self confidence along the way.</p>

<p>If a top program seems too intimating, perhaps you want to go to a "lesser" program. This works as long as you don't go so low that you basically put yourself out of contention by going to a place where the "desirable" jobs (aka recruiters) don't even show up. Got that? So pay close attention to the career services dept. </p>

<p>The same logic here applies to admission to top grad schools as well. You cannot expect to go a poor program, get a 4.0, and still be a competitive candidate. </p>

<p>Now, I'll entertain some of Sakky's counterpoints.</p>

<p>
[quote]
Even in the scenario you described, only half of the spots are unscreened, and presumably those spots are allocated randomly amongst all who request them.

[/quote]

Every student (at least in UW-Madison) gets to sign up X number of open interview slots. There are at least 15000 on-campus interview slots each year for a graduating class of a few hundreds. So you get the idea. </p>

<p>
[quote]
You can talk about the extra rigorous training that Berkeley would provides, and certainly Berkeley has no shortage of rigor, but companies don't really seem to care about that.

[/quote]

Well, I don't know about that. I know my company does care A LOT. </p>

<p>
[quote]
engineering salaries don't vary significantly with the prestige of the school... If they did, you would expect them to pay Berkeley students more. They don't.

[/quote]

That's right! It is a common practise to pay everybody on the same payscale. Then use the signup bonus, relocation package and other perks (e.g. options) to sweeten an offer, especially in top schools where there is more competition for talents. The two tables you quoted fail to include this little piece of information. </p>

<p>So, if a hiring company could make an average offer (w/o any bonus package) and still meet the yield, you bet they will! Don't get me wrong, most, if not all, employers want top talents at the least possible cost. That is not rocket science, is it? That's one of the reasons they recruit at "second-tier" schools where they could get away with some good hires without paying the full fare.</p>

<p>Putting every new hire on the essentially same starting pay also makes it easy with promotions/raises based on on-job performance. Put it differently, once you get in the door, your undergrad degree (and GPA) almost cease to become a factor. You have to work your way up just like everyone else. Of course, the real challenge is getting in.</p>

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<p>So what exactly is a "second tier" engineer school?</p>