<p>I'm a freshman and over this semester I've gravitated towards an art history major. All my grades this year have been A's, except the one art history course I took last semester in which I got a C+. Should I keep going with art history or has this grade damaged my chances at future grad schools/internships?</p>
<p>If you get outstanding grades/experiences in the future, I don’t think one introductory class will kill your chances in the field. But you have to ask: why did you get this grade? If this is the field you hope to specialise in, it seems odd that you would do so poorly…</p>
<p>If you are a freshman, then it will be very easy to bring up your GPA if you want to. It is much harder to raise your GPA if you get poorer grades in your later years.</p>
<p>There could be a number of reasons for the C+, which you need to consider in order to answer your question. Was it a more difficult than normal professor? Was the material difficult? Did you procrastinate on homework and not study for tests? Or did you spend a lot of time and effort and still not do as well as you’d hoped? </p>
<p>If it was a bad/difficult professor, or if you just slacked off, then the C+ is not a sign that you should not pursue the major. If you found the core material difficult, then you might want to look into what future courses you’d be taking and decide whether it’s what you want to pursue.</p>
<p>I earned a 5 on the ap art history exam, so I placed out of intro art history and into this class, which was an upper level east asian art history course. It was material I had never seen before and I guess I was just overly confident that I could do the coursework without studying. I am just concerned that one bad grade in upper level coursework would look bad further down the line to grad school admissions, internships, etc. I’m not sure how much individual grades vs gpa matters in these situations.</p>
<p>Grad schools place far more interest in your last 2 years of undergrad - if your GPA rises over the years, that looks good. That’s not to say you can slack off freshman and sophomore year, but if things don’t go as well as planned you just need to work harder your last few years. They probably won’t care what you got in East Asian art history if your major GPA and overall GPA is high. There are many other factors that go into grad school admissions as well, such as GRE scores, internships (which one grade in one course won’t doom you from), personal statements, recommendations, etc. The GPA doesn’t tell them much, so although you want it to be as high as possible, it isn’t the deciding factor in most cases.</p>