Just about every single time. For large companies, more than once because they explicitly wanted to have it written on the application.
Every time.
C is supposed to mean solidly passing, and many schools restrict retaking C or higher grades.
No one is making that argument. No one.
I posted this a few years ago, I’ll post it again here:
OP is already in a range where getting professional employment will be difficult (especially without experience, internships, etc.) and is close to that range where it becomes all but impossible without something exceptional up your sleeve. I really think OP needs to quickly figure out how to consistently raise that GPA, and if they cannot do so then they need to either take a break from school (to give them more time to figure it out) or find a new profession. I have friends and former classmates dealing with this, and graduating with a low GPA can make things very hard for a very long time.
Since my son is currently completing a co-op, I have a list of all the employers that interviewed at his school and their requirements. Although I don’t believe there is a way to post that here, I have done the math.
34.9% of the employers interviewing for co-op students on his campus were seeking a minimum GPA of 3.0 (just over 1/3 of the employers)
ONLY 6.35% of the employers that came to campus were seeking a GPA above 3.0 (1 employer was only interviewing students with 3.5 and above)
AND 58.73% of the employers were interviewing students with sub-3.0 GPAs, in fact 9.5% of the employers were interviewing students with a minimum 2.2.
Once again, anecdotal, but I don’t believe employers would waste their time interviewing such students if they had no intention of considering them for positions. Of course, other information on their resumes and interviewing skills would be very important factors for those with lower GPAs.
As far as being requested for my own GPA upon job searches, after nearly 25 years in my professional career, I’d say that it’s requested in online applications as an HR filter about 50% of the time, however since I haven’t included it on my resume in well over a decade, I’d guess that there are very few hiring managers that see it or care. I know in the times I have participated in interviews( in IT), it’s a question I’ve never been concerned with.
Every job I’ve had has asked. Obviously my internships wanted to know. My first “real” job after earning my PhD also asked.
You finished your PhD?!? =))
@jrcsmom - what school?
Okay. So far at least three of you have indicated that virtually every position that you have ever applied to has asked for your undergrad GPA. I admit to being very surprised.
What I now wonder is “why?”… I assume that you are all well into your careers. Almost no employer generally cares about anything you did more than 20 years ago. Why would they want to know your GPA, after so many years of experience?
In this regard, I also wonder… are these applications for high paying high performance jobs, or for jobs which merely provide a “comfortable” income. My guess is the former.
Alright, that’s a good set of numbers to work with. Let’s just for the sake of argument say that that’s a representative sample (or let’s round and say 35%, 5%, and 60%, respectively). Another thing to note is that there are quite certainly more graduates than there are jobs for them. One quick source that seems to justify that argument: http://cis.org/more-us-stem-grads-than-jobs
By those numbers, let’s just say there are 150 students, 100 jobs, and 75 students have a 3.0 or above. For 40 of those jobs, the lower half will not have any chance of getting them because the cutoff disqualifies them. For the other 60 jobs, there are 110 candidates, 35 of which have a higher GPA. Those will probably get a job before the lower ones do. Which would leave 25 jobs for 75 students with low GPAs, if every engineering student took an engineering job. They don’t, so there are a few more openings than that. But the point still remains: when looking for a job with a low GPA, the odds really aren’t in your favor.
First, why would you assume that everyone here is well into their careers? There are a lot of people on here at every stage of their careers!
Second, most employers care about GPA for about 5 years or so, after which your other accomplishments (or lack thereof) are more important. I can’t speak for anyone else here, but all of my job interviews occurred within 5 years of getting my degree, but in all fairness, I am less than a decade in the profession as yet.
I was applying at large employers who hired for a variety of positions, some high performance, some “comfortable”. Even “comfortable”-income jobs have numerous applicants and can afford to be a bit picky.
My son is enjoying his full tuition scholarship at Alabama.
For my own son when he obtained his co-op he had around a 3.3 and now has just above a 3.0. And although I can’t speak with much authority about hiring in engineering, I know many gainfully employed people in IT who barely earned their degrees. In fact my son’s father, failed out of college, had to petition to return, graduated with well less than a 3.0 (probably around a 2.0), and later in his career went on to work for a major, global, database corporation.
I see comments above, such as “2.80-2.99: Will struggle to find work at large companies, can generally find work at smaller employers”, but where is the evidence for that?
I live very near Rose-Hulman and I hear it annually reported on the local news that upon graduation 100% of their graduates receive job offers and employers leave disappointed because they don’t fill all their positions. I’ll have to look it up, but I doubt that 100% of their graduates finish their degrees with a 3.0 or above.
Are those students struggling to find jobs in engineering, truly struggling because of their GPAs or is it their interviewing skills or is it lack of work experience on their resume?
That was me, and I am speaking from my own personal experience. While I was an undergrad I participated in a couple of honor societies and helped to arrange employer visits, talking to them about what they were looking for in new hires. A few years after I started at my current employer I was in a position where I was helping with some of the recruiting efforts which gave me access to our standards for different types of positions, both in recruiting and in actual hiring. I am currently back in grad school but have several friends who are now in various management positions at various companies asking me to refer undergrads and grad students to them, and they give me criteria that they are looking for both as minimums and as expectations.
Yes. Hiring is generally holistic, all of these are important. You can overcome a low GPA with good experience or a solid interview (assuming you can get one!), and you can miss opportunities despite a great GPA if you interview poorly and/or have no or bad experience. But GPA is an easy, metric that has (again, in my experience) a pretty good correlation with workplace success.
I am 6 years past my BS but only 4 months past my PhD, so I probably don’t qualify for that assumption. That said, I did get the impression that, in a job function where a PhD was mandatory, including my undergraduate GPA was a formality, probably just satisfying some blanket hiring policy.
Well it’s a weird case with me. I suppose you could classify it as “high performance” but salary-wise it is kind of middle of the road (though I suppose relatively high for the career path I’m on right now). It’s a comfortable living, which not all PhD students can say right out of school.
You have a B-/C+ GPA! Finish your degree!
If the industry is hopping again in 2 years when you graduate, you can start at a service company if you can’t get on with an oil company. Or you can use the fact that you have a degree to go into some other field, where an engineering degree with a C+ GPA will be a great asset.
Petroleum Engineering is an extremely difficult major. Get your degree, then get a job - any job. You won’t ever regret getting an engineering degree, I am sure you will always regret dropping out.
I know people who were a lot happier after leaving engineering. I personally didn’t regret dropping out, because it gave me time to get my head together, go back, and graduate with a much better GPA. I’ve stayed in contact with some engineering grads from my first go round who graduated in that <2.80 GPA range who have had trouble finding jobs and even now so many years later are still below the salary I hit just a few years into my professional career.
@NROTCgrad, I don’t think anyone ever asked or cared about my undergrad GPA or my doctorate GPA except for then first job with each degree. And I never put it on my resumes except when interviewing for a job while still a student.
Stay in school. It’s not such a bad GPA, and you don’t have any plans for what you would do if you did drop out. It’s not like you’re a freshman. You’re 90 hours in and there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Get the degree, then use it to be an engineer, or use it for something other than engineering.
You are well on your way to completing that degree. If you believe you can satisfactorily pass all the remaining degree requirements I would advise you to finish it. You have rare language skills that could be appealing to an employer. If you also have good “people skills” and show up on time, smile at your co-workers and enthusiastically take on whatever scut work they throw at you as an intern/new-hire, you are well on your way to being highly employable.
A 2.75 in junior year engineering is a good GPA. I’d recommend staying the course, but why don’t you discuss this with some of your professors. Pick the class you did the best in and maybe one you did the worst in. And if you have a professor that seems approachable, talk to them too. See what they think of your skills in the program, get some ideas on what to improve, etc.
Junior year engineering is tough, it’s the toughest year there is. You maybe should have done better freshman and sophomore year, but maybe you did not have the high school background or maybe you are at a school where average GPA is low. You may actually - gasp - have to work even harder for the next few semesters - but it won’t kill you …
You could mention the school - some are notoriously harder than others. Any ABET accredited program will be hard.
And yes, many, many engineers do very little work related to academic style classes. Either you can move on to software to solve those problems that you struggle to work on by hand, or you can move on to lab or facility work, or if you aren’t interested or are stymied by the details you can go into management or requirements or documentation or systems or a lot of other things.
Also engineering needs people who are hands on, there is typically hardware somewhere, not just drawings or analysis of hardware, and that needs people who can touch hardware and get it to work. Need a few less people sitting at computers … or well managing or thinking about how to get it done …
Oddly most people do not want to work with hardware, so you actually already have a special skill …
Get the degree, unless you get thrown out.
GPA matters if you have 10 qualified resumes and 2 openings, so part of this is hoping there is lots of work in the petroleum field when you graduate. Then you find something you can do fairly well at that first job, and you work really, really hard, harder than everyone else and you make sure you are actually accomplishing things when you work … getting things done, maybe the things others think are too trivial or not interesting enough for their 3.5 GPA brains.
Career aspirations are finding something you like to do (remember you are being paid to do it) and by working really, really hard can convince people that they want YOU doing it. Then staying employed at it …
Stay away from research and development jobs that don’t involve hardware … might be good if those kind of jobs just hire the high GPA folks. If you need to research the right equation or know chemistry in and out, maybe that is not a good place for you right now… that is OK.
Go for good solid engineering positions that may involve dirt or manual labor (at least working with techs or manual labor folks directly rather than from an office setting) or your foreign language skills or all of the above …
There are jobs that require folks who can breeze through there classes and jobs that don’t … pay might be different but mid and late career salaries are much more about what you can bring to the party than mere intellect.
I am very sure there is an engineer on every rig and lots of them in all the refineries… and I doubt most of them are doing academic exercises … The guy/gal who get the rig running or the product flowing are pretty useful folks…
A 5 or 10k or even 20k+ difference in starting salary is easily made up by advancement or just raises for getting stuff done.
If you continue to learn in the workplace for 10, 20, 30 years, you could actually be … gasp … an expert in something … and no one will ask your GPA. Three are lots of academic underachievers or workplace overachievers, you take your pick of description, that do really, really well at work.
For summer job, why don’t you see if there is something right at your college that pays enough to cover bare essentials or even unpaid … but involves lab or hands-on work … not sure why you weren’t looking earlier in the year, but I am sure there is something out there. I am not even sure that working on a rig would be completely useless if you are going to be a petroleum engineer… at least you know exactly what goes on there …
Also contact the coop office, maybe they have something that suits your needs, and maybe take a semester or two off to coop, not to work at Burger King, and get an idea why you want to get that engineering degree … hint, it’s a pretty autonomous job with decent earnings after 4 years.
If there are refineries or wells or rigs near you, also stop by and ask if they would let you work summer. I think some experience on the line would be invaluable to a new engineer, and would get a lot of respect from hiring managers who would feel more comfortable sending you down to see the guys with grease on their hands if they think you actually will know what they are doing.
Get tutoring or find smart people to help you when you get back to classes.