Low GPA, How screwed am I for future jobs and graduate school?

I’m in my 3rd year right now and I realize I’m bombing most of my classes despite the fact that I’ve already tried studying hard and coming in for office hours. For most students at my school, 3rd year is supposedly the hardest year and so most students normally get a high freshman year GPA to balance out their low junior year GPA. Unfortunately for me, I had issues which caused me to have not necessarily a bad freshman year GPA, but only a decent one. At this point my GPA is already not that great (high 2.0s), and if I continue on, it’s probably only going to drop.

I think the biggest reasons I’m doing so poorly is because aside from having problems with poor professors, my lectures are super theory based and I’ve always been a practical learner and need to be hands-on rather than sit and listen lecture style. I’m also sadly not a very good test taker because I like to take my time to think about problems and most tests are problem-solving based where there is very limited time and so I often don’t finish in time, which with most tests having only a couple questions, one question has made the difference between 2 letter grades.

I’ve considered a major switch but feel it is a bit late in the game to do so and granted I don’t completely hate engineering, I’m just struggling. I’m wondering how much would my low engineering GPA hurt me with jobs and perhaps even graduate school? I will say if I do go for graduate school, it won’t be engineering (I’ve had enough of this engineering theory-based lectures), I have a lot of side interests and so I would probably go to graduate school for a different field just to explore a new career.

In your third and fourth years, you should be taking some engineering design courses, if you have not already taken some. Obviously, engineering science courses with more of the theory may have been prerequisites to the engineering design courses.

I’d say most of the courses I’m taking now are actually very theory based, they are typical engineering courses like fluid mechanics, soil mechanics, environmental science, & structural engineering analysis, majority of the design courses I’m pretty sure happen the 4th year.

You sound like somebody that would not like highly theoretical grad school… so don’t worry about that. (I was like that too but happened to be a good test taker).

As classes get more project-based, you will likely hit your sweet spot. Visit your campus career center and see if they can help you arrange a summer co-op. That will help when you get to senior year job hunt. Good luck!