Choosing Major & School


Is a 2.7 GPA at MIT for CS bad?

Say it is bad.  Bad for whom? Bad in what way?

Obviously, a 2.7 GPA from MIT is “worse” than a 5.0 GPA* from MIT, but “better” than a 2.7 GPA from University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, right? Right? Right? No, of course not. Like almost every other statement that includes the word “obviously”, this statement is actually false.

In the long run, your GPA does not matter. At all. Three to five years out of college, nobody will ever ask what your GPA is. A few deluded idiots might ask what school you went to, as if that actually mattered, but it doesn’t. Your work record, good or bad, will speak for itself.

I have met lots of undergraduates at Illinois who worked their butts off to get a 2.7 GPA. These students were often the first in their family to attend college, or just went to a weak high school, or transferred in from a weak community college, or were dealing with (or recovering from) a medical/emotional/financial crisis. These students knew they were starting with a disadvantage compared to the superstar students who get As without trying, but they didn’t care. Their goal was to learn as much as they can, to demonstrate as much mastery as they can, to finish the damn degree despite starting with one hand tied behind their back, to prove to their (not always supportive) family and friends and themselves that they can do this.

For those students, a 2.7 GPA was great!

Yeah, maybe other people are “better”, but so what?

Most of those students continued working their butts off and ended up in fantastic careers at places like Google and Facebook and Twitter. And three years after they graduated, nobody gave a monkey’s about some stupid number in some university database.

(My undergrad GPA, on the other hand, really was bad. But even that didn’t matter in the long run.)

Author: Jeff Erickson, CS professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

MIT GPA: MIT’s uses a 5.0 GPA scale, not the 4.0 scale used by most American universities.

Source: Quora

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