<p>Hello everyone,</p>
<p>Please help me out. Up until now I had not considered applying to grad school, especially since I have a job lined up, but I am starting to doubt myself on what I want to do in the future. However, I am not sure if my credentials will even allow me to get into a decent engineering grad school. This is my profile:</p>
<p>-3.1 GPA in Industrial Engineering at Georgia Tech (did terrible my freshman year)
-Two summer internships, one focused in warehousing and another in logistics
-Will do research in my last upcoming semester related to vehicle routing/lead time optimization
-Two professor recommendations and one from my boss.</p>
<p>I also haven't taken the GRE yet, but will do so in the Fall.</p>
<p>Do you guys think it's worth it for me to even apply? Or is this not enough info to tell?
I'm looking to apply to schools like Georgia Tech, Columbia, Texas A&M, U. Washington.</p>
<p>Thanks in advance! :)</p>
<p>If you don’t know what you want to do in the future, then do NOT go to grad school. You could end up wasting a lot of money/time on something you may not end up sticking with. It’s perfectly fine to take a few years to try some things out and narrow down what you want.</p>
<p>That said, top schools know the rigor of Georgia Tech and I don’t think that GPA will hurt you as much as you may believe. Provided that your letter of rec’s are excellent and portray you as a hard-working student taking difficult courses and not some slacker.</p>
<p>I assume you’re looking to apply to Industrial Engineering MS? Given that GT is ranked 1st in the nation for IE, I’d say that would be a big boost to wherever you apply.</p>
<p>It’s very normal to doubt yourself in the last weeks of your undergraduate career, even if you have a job lined up. You start thinking about the future and it looks scary, and the grass always looks greener - people who have decided on grad school sometimes wonder whether they should’ve gotten a job, whereas people who are about to start working (probably more so) panic a little about the thought of not being in school anymore and wonder whether they should’ve gone to graduate school. This is normal.</p>
<p>An MS with work experience is almost always more valuable than an MS without, so my recommendation is to go ahead and take the job you have lined up. Just work for a few years. If you still want to go to grad school in a few years, it will be there - it’s not going anywhere, I promise. But you’ll be far more competitive for master’s level jobs with a few years of work experience under your belt than you will with a BS, MS and no work experience.</p>