<p>Question:</p>
<p>How important is overall GPA in comparison to major GPA? </p>
<p>I have an average overall GPA at my very grade-deflated school (it's around a 3.3 right now, would probably be around a 3.4-ish by the time I apply to grad school) because I initially started out in an entirely different field my freshman year and completely bombed, while my major GPA is around a 3.9</p>
<p>Essentially, do bad grades in an unrelated field significantly hurt your application? I go to a rigorous undergrad and am counting on my recs/GRE/research exp to get me out of this mess.</p>
<p>Overall GPA matters, but your major GPA will of course matter more. However, graduate committees don’t want to see you failing or doing poorly in all your other classes because sometimes there are cognate courses you have to take in graduate school as well - and generally, they just want to see an overall good work ethic. However, it doesn’t seem like you were doing very poorly in other classes - a 3.3 is not a bad cumulative especially when paired with a 3.9 major GPA.</p>
<p>Also remember that some classes are not as unrelated as you think - for example, if you are applying to psychology programs and did poorly in math classes, that might actually be a red flag because there is some quantitative skill involved in psychology. Or if you bombed freshman composition, that might be a sign that you can’t write well.</p>