<p>What is PSU's average for undergrad engineering? Is a 3.5 good there?</p>
<p>is the GPA cumulative or major? honetly i think as long as u have done well in ur engineering courses u have still a chance.</p>
<p>
[quote]
if you have less than 3.8/4.0, don't bother to apply to MIT grad engineering. My friend got a 3.96 and got rejected from MIT, ended up at Harvard. Master of Engineering is a different story (you don't need GRE and you work during the day and study at night)
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I'm afraid I can't agree with that. I know a guy who had about a 3.5/4 from Virginia in physics, and still got into a graduate engineering program at MIT. In fact, he got into the MIT LFM program (the combined SM + MBA program), but his 'primary' application was to engineering, and so it was the engineering program that formally admitted him (with the MBA program just running a secondary check), and he was considered primarily an engineering grad student at MIT for administrative purposes (for example, during graduation ceremonies, his name was announced with the other engineers, not with the MBA's). Heck, there are plenty of other people who got in via engineering as their primary app to the LFM program with GPA's that while decent, aren't THAT high, i.e. ranging as low as a 3.3. </p>
<p>I also don't know what you mean by the Master of Engineering program being a different story. It is true that some of the MIT MEng programs require that you work during the day (basically, by taking an internship). But you don't really study at night, as that internship actually serves as a substrate from which you can write a thesis. Other MIT MEng programs do not have such an internship requirement and are thus full-time programs (in general, MIT runs only a handful of part-time programs) Furthermore, many MIT MEng programs, especially the EECS one, aren't open to non-MIT-undergrads anyway, so it's all a moot point.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I also don't know what you mean by the Master of Engineering program being a different story. It is true that some of the MIT MEng programs require that you work during the day (basically, by taking an internship). But you don't really study at night, as that internship actually serves as a substrate from which you can write a thesis. Other MIT MEng programs do not have such an internship requirement and are thus full-time programs (in general, MIT runs only a handful of part-time programs) Furthermore, many MIT MEng programs, especially the EECS one, aren't open to non-MIT-undergrads anyway, so it's all a moot point.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Master of Engineering / Professional Master of Engineering are generally for full time working adults who go to school at night. Some schools don't require GRE at all for this program. It is part of the grad school but it's probably different. Almost all large school has it like UCLA, Texas, UM ... They only required a 3.0 and some letters from employers to get in. It's an "easier" version of graduate level engineering.</p>
<p>If ur talking about MIT Master of Science in engineering, I don't think a 3.8 is safe enough. Like I said friend applied for Master of Science with a 3.96 and a perfect GRE math score, got rejected. I don't know why.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Master of Engineering / Professional Master of Engineering are generally for full time working adults who go to school at night. Some schools don't require GRE at all for this program. It is part of the grad school but it's probably different. Almost all large school has it like UCLA, Texas, UM ... They only required a 3.0 and some letters from employers to get in. It's an "easier" version of graduate level engineering.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Allright, then you should have specified which MEng programs you were talking about, because it definitely doesn't hold for most MIT MEng programs.</p>
<p>
[quote]
If ur talking about MIT Master of Science in engineering, I don't think a 3.8 is safe enough. Like I said friend applied for Master of Science with a 3.96 and a perfect GRE math score, got rejected. I don't know why.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Look, nothing is 'safe enough' from a GPA perspective. MIT is far more concerned about your research ability, especially (obviously) for the PhD students but also for the SM students as well. That's because every SM student at MIT has to write a research thesis, and that tends to be the biggest hangup. Lots of people can do great in the coursework but just can't complete the thesis, and so they don't graduate. MIT is therefore understandable loathe to admit people who they don't think will graduate. </p>
<p>Like I said, I know people who have gotten admitted into SM engineering programs at MIT with GPA's as low as 3.3, perhaps even less. The key was that they produced strong evidence to show that they were good independent researchers. </p>
<p>Now of course I'm just speculating here as to why your friend got rejected. I think it is probably the research ability as that is usually the top admissions criteria. But it could have been other things. Maybe his rec letters were mediocre. Maybe he screwed up in his statement of purpose (i.e. he submitted a letter with the wrong school name). I don't know. </p>
<p>What I do know is that MIT's average admitted graduate engineering students (PhD and SM) had a GPA of around 3.6. Hence, there are clearly SOME people who had a GPA less than that. Granted, some of them were surely MIT undergrad students getting the MEng, but I have a hard time believing that that accounts for ALL of them.</p>
<p>Hey guys… newb to this site and stumbled across this thread (which happens to be a question on my mind)…</p>
<p>Anyway, I kinda skipped over the whole discussion about MIT and Harvey Mudd etc… I’m not quite that caliber, nor is my school. I go to Iowa State and will probably graduate in the vicinity of a 2.8 next year. Now, I’m not really lookin to grad school, but like a lot of the others have said, every employer I have talked to says “3.0 or your resume is in the trash” type of thing. So did I just waste my 4.5 years and 50 grand to get a degree that I can’t get a job with? My thought is this, well, if I can’t get that 1st job, how am I going to get any other job in the field if they all require either GPA or previous job experience? Any ideas on the truth of this logic? Or am I missing a key factor somewhere?</p>
<p>There are plenty of employers out there who don’t require a 3.0. Keep looking!</p>
<p>most people would advise you to try to get an unpaid internship since you graduate still in a year.</p>
<p>Ccrider I am in the same situation you are. I had to take an extra semester to graduate from my ABET accredited University, and I have a low gpa, 2.81. Barring the one semester I did bad in, I still recovered after that and finished received high enough grades in the graduate level electives I’ve taken to prove I am a competent electrical and electronics engineer. </p>
<p>Looking back I wish I had something higher, but there is nothing I can do now.</p>
<p>Around 60% of students with the B.S. at MIT go for the MEng (sometimes on the way towards Ph.D.). I am sure that M.Eng students have a huge impact on the average GPA of MIT grad studdents.</p>
<p>Personally, I would say 3.0 is my the cutoff for “respectable GPA” in college although I think GPA is, like other measurements of success, flawed because GPA doesn’t measure work or research ability but ften the ability to complete closed-notes tests well within a given amount of time. I think that is a useful skill but that being alone to do well in courses alone doesn’t lead to great career potential. Then again, some courseloads in engineering are more challenging than others and some engineering colleges are somewhat more challenging than others.</p>
<p>Secondly, I think the way research potential is measured is also flawed. Different colleges have different research groups and foci and professors at some colleges (UCSB Physics for example) individually are extremely productive researchers while other departments due to size produce more research. I think that just because someone worked with a famous professor and was the last author of a paper which was submitted to a prestigious conference doesn’t mean that he is better than someone else who made more contributions to a less influential paper, especially if the big idea is not attributable to the stdent.</p>
<p>I graduated nearly 30 years ago with a 2.7 GPA and a BS in Engineering, and had several job offers.</p>
<p>The economy is a bigger factor in getting a job than your GPA.</p>
<p>FWIW, I was one of 7 engineers from my graduating class and discipline that went to work for the same large company, and in the same region. I had a lower GPA than 5 of the others. But I was more of a “practical” engineer, and blew past those others on our respective career paths.</p>
<p>If you have a decent work ethic, the real world is a lot more forgiving of a 2.8 GPA than the academic world. The lower GPA may preclude you from working for certain companies, but don’t fret it. Those companies are actually doing you a favor by not hiring you.</p>
<p>at Purdue in ChemE, a 3.0 puts you in the top 20% of the class. My advisor told me today, obviously its better in other majors, but the first year engineering average is well under 3.0</p>
<p>^That’s pretty hardcore…</p>
<p>UMich Engineering median is a 2.9 and the standard deviation is about a .45 from what data I’ve been able to get (holds pretty well above the median, but I don’t know about below the median). </p>
<p>And this thread is really old.</p>
<p>
I highly doubt this. That’s probably the most aggressive curving in the nation if correct.</p>
<p>I think Purdue is supposed to have very low grade inflation. If ChemE is considered the hardest major there then I believe it.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com/Purdue.html[/url]”>http://www.gradeinflation.com/Purdue.html</a></p>
<p>That’s for all of Purdue, so you could easily see that the median GPA must be quite low in engineering.</p>
<p>I am simply repeating what my adviser told me</p>
<p>Just want to say that top school engineering is tougher…</p>
<p>D had 4.75 high school GPA, and then easily a 4.0 engineering freshman GPA from a great state university honor program (while fullfiling her Cornell transfer option requirements). She is at Cornell for her sophomroe year, studied harder and got 3.3. Not easy, not easy!</p>
<p>^What engineering courses did she take freshman year and sophmore year?</p>
<p>A 2.8 these days (anywhere except a select few schools) sure sounds like consistently straddling the curve, but you’re probably not in poor shape because of it. Are you happy with it, is probably the better question? Do you feel like you understand the concepts? Is that up to your personal standards? That’s what matters. If that’s the case, then you’re almost out of the woods on the GPA-mattering thing. Just do your best to pull it up.</p>
<p>That said, know also that you shouldn’t expect to be able to compete with 3.0+ peers on all fronts. Particularly if your resume does get tossed, you would be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t recognize that employers don’t know you, and a GPA is one outside-in way of getting familiar with your work ethic.</p>
<p>^ She took PHYS, Hornors Calc II, C++ with Metlab, Defferential Equations, Freshman writing, ARCH Studio (6 credit hours each semesters with 30 hours/week work) in her freshman year.</p>
<p>PHYS 2213, MATH 2940, ENGRI, one CS class, and a writing class in Fall 2011 as a sophmore in Cornell. She can handle it for graduation, I guess, but she is aiming at going to graduate school. (she is a IQ 156 kid and I am surprised the classes are hard even for her.)</p>