I am a freshman at Pratt in Duke. Prepared very well for Bio but unfortunately though the professors specifically told us that the final exam won’t be cumulative, we got tricked by many questions that appeared from 1st semester and I landed up with a C grade. My classmates were also shocked. I had worked extremely hard for this. My overall gpa went down to slightly below 3.0. I am feeling really bad and incapable of being in this school. I was wondering if it is possible to recover from this situation. Do Grad schools or companies care a lot about freshman year grades?
Sorry to hear about this. Getting good grades is not easy, and takes a lot of work. It sounds like there was some miscommunication. Just continue to work hard and try to figure out how to improve.
Have you sought the help of the Academic Resource Center (ARC) on campus? They have a peer tutoring program along with some academic skills training. As you know, many top students find it difficult to adjust to the rigor of Duke.
Now getting back to your question about graduate school: depends on what you are seeking. If you are interested in med school, a single C won’t kill you, but they do consider freshman year grades. Other graduate programs may or may not pay attention. Say for example you are interested in an MBA, then your freshman year biology grade may not make a huge impact.
@varshakgan you are not alone. this happens a lot to engineering students, especially engineering students at very competitive schools like Duke. The biggest threat is not that your sub 3.0 freshman gap is gonna hurt you, but rather the fact that very often students who do quite worse than they expected freshman year become discouraged and depressed and lose the energy and drive to get themselves out this situation. So the most important thing for you is to remain positive and not give up. You need to look realistically at what you want to do after college as a career. A sub-3.0 GPA is viable for some engineering, computer science jobs but if you want to go into business (banking, consulting, corporate dev at major firm etc) then a sub-3.0 is not gonna cut it at all, in fact anything below a 3.3-3.4 is not gonna cut it either. For grad schools 3.3 +, preferably 3.5+ (depending on the grad school) would be fine. As for med school, law school you need 3.6+ at the very least. Think very carefully about what you want to do as a career and plan accordingly. if you want to go into business, law, medicine I say switch out of engineering since most likely you won’t be able to get the necessary grades. Also retaking bio if you plan on med school to make up for the C is a good idea.
Thank you very much, Gopal and Penn95. I understand and won’t give up. I planned to do Bio Medical Engineering. I think Duke won’t let repeat a subject unless a student gets a D. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out for me in freshman year however hard I worked. I guess that if I do well henceforth, I may be able recover? Hoping that there is still hope if I pull up my GPA?
What you’re experiencing is pretty common. Duke engineering is tough and many smart students struggle. I disagree that you have to get a certain GPA in order to get a good job. For grad/med/law school, GPA certainly matters more admittedly. I work at a boutique management consulting firm (with a tech bent), and we don’t care about GPA as some people don’t even put it on their resume. And once you get your first job, it becomes definitely irrelevant (unless you later apply to b-school or grad programs). Yes, there is still hope to pull up your GPA. Often, the intro courses are honestly more difficult as they weed people out. Companies understand that Duke engineering is difficult; you’re not going to have no hope of a future if you get a few C’s. But, yes, if your desire is to attend a top 10 med/law/grad program or get an offer from one of the MBB consulting firms, then, yes, sub 3.5 GPA won’t cut it, but your life will still move on and you won’t be a failure. Keep your head up, work hard and try to improve time management skills, and see what happens.
Thank you so much, That’s very helpful. I will certainly work hard henceforth. I heard that the Major GPA may have more weight, so I am trying to understand if intro subjects like Bio and Linear Algebra are considered part of Major GPA or would only courses starting with letters BME contribute to major GPA