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Biomedical engineer with a 2.977GPA. Lots of extra curriculars, volunteered in labs, 160 credit hours of mostly STEM classes, lots of grad-level courses, relevant work experience, but GPA was 0.023 too low to pass the automated filters and I didn't get into any of the grad programs I applied for.

I ended up doing fine in software development though. Also, the Wright Brothers didn't need a research lab to invent flight. Biology-focused hacker spaces are on the rise so there are still ways to do research.

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There's many issues in our science system, but it may be a blessing that you got rejected.

I'm a senior software engineer. My wife has a PhD in biochemistry from a top university. When she graduated she could not get a job anywhere. We both agreed she should choose a different path and she started a business in a totally unrelated field.

Meanwhile someone like me...I'm literally turning away interviews. I have no doubt she'd be able to be success in the IT industry amongst the many roles offered if she had chosen the path. And many of her peers have self studied, dropped their grad programs and get hired by the likes of Facebook, Microsoft.

Pragmatically, the smartest one would never get into fields with limited jobs and pay. I'd rather pick a field so I can feed my family, than to save the world.

The US will get leapfrogged in R&D as the brain drain goes towards generating ad revenue (For the record I do not work for a company that relies on generating ads)

> Meanwhile someone like me...I'm literally turning away interviews.

How do you manage that? I've been a software developer for over 20 years now, and every time I lose my job it's a SLOG to find another one, with anywhere from a few months to a year in between. I can't even remember the last time a recruiter contacted me (perhaps 5-6 times in my entire career).

It's not like my technical skills are lacking. I've worked professionally with most popular languages and technologies, have dozens of popular open source projects under my belt, many of which you're probably even using at work in some fashion. I've even been called a "miracle worker" a few times for the projects I've saved from ruin, or terrible processes I've optimized.

I'm friendly with everyone, not badmouthing, staying out of politics, treating everyone professionally and expecting the same.

But then whenever there are layoffs or there's an opportunity to push someone out, I'm in the first wave to go (they never say why). I've even been fired for "not stepping up enough." And then I spend another few months slinging resumes all over, spending my days doing coding challenges in the hopes of getting an interview. Then another year of employment and the cycle starts all over again. I have to constantly prove myself again and again, as if I were fresh out of college or something.

This may be difficult to hear, but something is wrong if you have been working for 20 years and old colleagues aren't occasionally checking in to see if you'd like a different gig at their current company. The people who called you a miracle worker, they don't keep in touch? They don't want you to join their current project?

You may want to ask someone who you are on good terms with what's going on.

I've never had an old colleague contact me. Is that a thing?

Forgive me, but I'm not even sure what I should be asking these people... "Why haven't you contacted me" sounds too abrasive...

Maybe 10% of my coworkers transitioned from work acquaintance ("Hi Jim") into good work acquaintance ("hey man, grab lunch?") into friend ("hey man, want to grab dinner/beers later?") into good friend ("hey man, want to go on an out-of-country trip?").

If nobody is making the jump into good work acquaintance, where you enjoy hanging out casually without needing an explicit work reason, something is amiss. I don't try to form connections, it just happens similar to how you make friends in class. Work is class. If nobody talks to you after the project is over something isn't right.

You can't ask people who aren't close directly why they aren't close, but maybe family members / non-work friends. "Is there something about me that makes it difficult to make connections?" It's quite hard to get explicit feedback on this type of thing.

> You can't ask people who aren't close directly why they aren't close, but maybe family members / non-work friends.

Yes! I've done exactly this, and the result is always the same: They can't believe that I'm having problems in this area. "I can't understand how ANYONE could dislike you!" is what my dad said.

Fuck... now this is making me sad.

Ah, don't get sad -- you seem aware enough to recognize the problem. Just a few thoughts:

* These connections are easier when you're in your 20s, single, have time to kill. The company culture may encourage/discourage this too.

* If you're a developer, you may be among a less-extroverted cohort, and have to make efforts to reach out vs. being reached-out-to.

* These are the hard-to-teach-explicitly items, but is every interaction with coworkers purely about the project? Hobbies, shared interests, movies they've seen, games they play, trips they've done/are going to do, etc.? With a (non-work) shared interest it's hard not to have casual conversations that build a work repoire over time.

* There are intangible social signals about willingness to connect (person is overly polite/formal/rigid, facial expressions/body language, warmth of tone and language, etc.). Basically when you sit down next to someone on an airplane, you can tell if they want to chat without having to ask them. Being actively disliked is rarely the issue. You don't dislike the cashier at the grocery store, but the relationship is purely transactional, we can be friendly but let's just get this over with. For some reason, your coworkers may see things this way.

Yes, that's a thing if you have good relationships with coworkers who have hiring power in later jobs. Since I switched to being a founder I've firmly disabused most previous coworkers of the notion that I'd ever come to work with them, but I used to regularly hear from them, and now I routinely reach out to the people that I liked working with.

If you're not experiencing this, you really can't ask anyone else anything, but you can ask yourself what's wrong. It might just be that you haven't made friends with people who have hiring influence; that said, most people can at least refer folks. More likely is that you aren't getting personally close enough with people at work, so they are not thinking of you. Spend more time interacting on a human level with non-engineers, who are way more often to be influential re: hiring at future jobs.

It's also possible that you're not considered a solid worker, or you don't get along with people, but in my experience that's a lot less common than merely not making friends with people who are likely to have jobs to offer in the future. Learning to find and befriet those people is a key career skill.

Original commenter here. People don't reach out to me. I reach out to people. I make sure I keep the relationship open. People are way too busy with their lives to maintain connections. Imagine how happy you would be if someone you used to work with reached out to see how you're doing. I'd be very happy. That's why I try to do it...because I know on the other end my former colleague would be happy.

I work at a huge company and have been on many teams and projects. Every few days, weeks - I'd ping people just to see what's up and strike a conversation. I don't do it annoyingly...there's a fine balance. You also need to be able to tell who is social and who is not. If you can read that someone has a social personality I'll talk to them more, be friend them...talk to things besides work. There are those who only like to talk about work, and that's fine. Then we just talk about work. I go out of my way to help them out with any problems at work or outside of work.

For example someone is a first time home buyer...so I gave advice (I've bought 2 homes in my young career). Another, a manager...his son is in med school, I gave advice (my roommates in grad school were in med school). Another had problems with implementing PGP...so I stayed late one night to help her out.

This is insulting and just flat out unrealistic. If you've had this experience, great, but what you're describing is very far from the norm.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-survey-reveals-85-all-job...

Working somewhere for decades and not being in touch with a single colleague is not normal. Imagine hearing "I didn't keep in touch with a single person from my 16 years of primary + university education after school ended."

I don't keep in touch with anyone I went to school with, no. I also don't keep in touch with many past colleagues beyond a yearly checkup, if at all.

Sorry, but your assumption about how the world works / should work isn't applicable to everyone. Some people don't have the capacity to do so.

Some people can't see color either, and unfortunately their life is more difficult because of it. But seeing color is the expected outcome for most, and the world is built with that assumption in mind.

If you aren't making connections you are unfortunately at a severe disadvantage. To the extent you're self-aware to realize this, you may be able to correct it. Otherwise, like anything else, you learn to adapt.

What a ludicrous comparison. Contrasting a physical disability vs. a conscious choice not to engage with colleagues from companies past is a sign of a failing argument.

Your tone also comes off as incredibly patronizing, as though you know my life better than I do.

Rest assured, not keeping in touch with old contacts has not caused me to miss any opportunities that I would be otherwise interested in.

Seems weird to never be contacted by recruiters, are you not using linkedin during your job searches? After my last round of linkedin application spamming I get a steady stream of emails about opportunities even after I stopped looking.

Yes, when I'm looking for work I turn on the looking-for-work thing on linkedin. I'll get 1 maybe 2 generic pings over the next few months for "fullstack dev" (which I'm not - I do server-side or low level software), but that's about it.

I don't want to dunk on you with really obvious suggestions like "you have a bad resume, fix it" type comments, maybe you've already had it looked over, and you're in a non-optimal location or something. Maybe ask a few specific questions on reddit somewhere like r/cscareerquestions.

I've been wracking my brain for years over this, and I'm still not any closer to understanding what the problem is.

I've had my resume looked at and tweaked over and over. I never send a cover letter without having someone else proofread and offer suggestions. I've lived and worked in many tech-hub places, including San Francisco for 6 years.

I just don't know... I think it's got to be socially related, but I have a hard time examining that aspect because I'm autistic. But I always make a concerted effort not to offend people, to make sure everyone gets their say and can contribute. People even say I'm a really nice guy, so then I'm left wondering what exactly "it" is that's tanking me...

It always happens the same way:

- I get a job and everyone is super friendly. Some inevitable technical hiccups getting set up for the first month, but no big deal.

- Everything goes swimmingly for the next 6 months to a year. People seem happy with me, performance reviews are fine, 1-on-1 with the boss is fine. I even make a point of asking if they're unhappy with anything about me, and they say "no, everything's fine".

Then one day things go bad (or maybe they've been bad and I didn't see). People start being rude to me, start shutting me out of conversations, start being extra harsh or petty in code reviews etc. In some cases they start name-calling. No higher-ups step in so I try to avoid the people doing this and not antagonize them.

Eventually my boss brings me in for the "it's not working out" talk. They can never give me a solid reason why, and often they resort to roundabout firing methods because it's technically illegal otherwise. There's never a warning, never a list of things to improve upon. I spend most of my days at a company wondering when I'll get "the call". The worst one happened on Dec 23rd.

So yeah... Probably nothing that anyone on HN could help with, because the feedback mechanism I'm subjected to is so vague. But it's frustrating nonetheless, and even today I have constant stress spikes whenever my boss asks to talk to me for a minute about something, wondering if this is it.

> I think it's got to be socially related, but I have a hard time examining that aspect because I'm autistic.

There you have it. It's brutally unfair, but autism, if strong enough to be perceivable, sounds like the most likely cause: you're different, and people don't like you because of it.

Even worse, I believe that people on the autism spectrum don't even perceive they're different. I personally have no idea whether I'm on that spectrum, or how far. Still: my own Mom once stated the "obvious": that I must notice that I'm not like others. I had to tell her that I don't. At 35.

So. People perceive you're different. It's obvious enough that they expect you to perceive that difference, even though you may not. So when you fail to conform to the obscure (to you) group norm, they end up rejecting you. Perhaps even rationalising that you're doing it on purpose (remember, the difference is obvious to them). Then you're out of the group.

---

There may be other factors as well. Folks tend to be kinder, more forgiving, of pretty people, so if you can improve that in any way, try to do so (one habit at a time though, take it easy). The easiest thing to go for, I think, is clothing: try having someone you trust chose your clothes for you. Pay explicit attention to the dress code at your workplace, emulate it a little (but don't buy the exact same clothes either!). Also consider light makeup if you're a woman (and maybe get counsel about that too).

Much harder is taking good care of your health. If you're fat, unfit, or otherwise unhealthy, try to work on that. Sleeping well, eating well, and exercising properly is surprisingly hard when you're not used to it, but it's a must.

---

Edit: also consider telling your colleagues about your autism. I expect it's not easy, and it may not even be a good idea, but there's a chance that people knew why you are the way you are, they'd tolerate it better.

(edit: oops sorry I didn't properly parse the bit about being autistic on first read. I won't delete my suggestions in case they are useful in some way)

Well the coworker stuff is a separate issue because recruiters don't usually know you, probably you need to address the two issues separately.

As for improving your interactions with coworkers, I'll just throw a few ideas because who knows, maybe the answer will come from a random source like me:

- read 'How to win friends and influence people', maybe some stuff by Mark Manson.

- Try to learn from your successful relationships what you're good at/comfortable with

- Actively choose the environment you aim work in to fit your social strengths e.g. team size, people types. ( This one depends a bit on solving the jobsearch issues first )

Asking for feedback directly will never work. Instead, try asking a friend (or use a fake account) to ask for a reference about yourself. You can then be as targetted as you like.. "have you considered referring throwaway_gerts before? If yes/no why?" Or "were there any issues working with throwaway_gerts?"

Lots of replies and I'd mostly agree.

I work for a big company... It's not a FAANG, but it's recognizable world wide. Even though it's not a tech company, I believe the name recognition gives some credibility to recruiters.

I'm lucky to have worked at a previous company that had a lot of well connected software engineers and management. It was a mid size company so I was 2 levels from the CTO. They are my connections on LinkedIn so I think that adds credibility.

I'm a java developer. Despite the hmm...'hate' for Java on HN, if you go to dice.com and put in various languages...Java is very high ranking. Having years of experience in a technology with a lot of jobs help.

Some alluded to keeping in touch with old coworkers. I'd have to strongly agree to that. Strongly. I have your back, you have my back. Right? I hate interviewing. HATE. I've been fortunate in the last several years to have had 4 former colleagues ask if I want to join their team/company. I seriously considered each one, but declined for various reason.

At one point, my company was having layoffs. I knew I should have a backup plan in case my name was on the list. But I hate interviewing...all it took was a phone call to an old colleague of mine (he's now a director) and I was given an open job offer. I enjoy where I currently work {enough} that I'll stay for a while longer.

It's unfortunate to see people disadvantaged by pursuing a truly difficult major.

A 2.97 in bioengineering could represent someone who simply took more challenging courses, and got lower grades because the courses were truly difficult.

A straight bio major might have a 3.8, but never had to work through a year-long Pchem sequence, instead padding with softer, more grade-inflated courses.

The GPA is an interesting system when you sit down to think about it. I came into college with almost 30 general education credit hours. I received the International Baccalaureate diploma in high school. I only needed 1 more gen ed course to fulfill my requirements.

So imagine me, a 18 year old jumping immediately into fairly difficult courses my freshman year...adapting to college. Whilst my peers are taking English 101 and inflating their GPA. I did not receive internships offers my early years in college and I feel this had a big part of it.

Not for you obviously, but in case someone else that is still in the situation of applying for grad school is reading this.

Have you checked outside the US?

In the EU there are plenty of universities that offer grad programs without the crazy access requirements of US universities. Tuition is free or at a token price in many countries. And it's reasonably easy to get a paid PhD studentship where you get paid a real salary, not slave wages (probably this is not that easy to get when you're straight out of your Master's with a mediocre GPA, but once you have shown ability to do research successfully and have a couple of papers under your belt, it shouldn't be hard in most places).

Sure, EU universities don't give you the clout of Ivy League, but many do perfectly fine research, you may even learn more as the 3rd PhD student of a professor than as the 27th PhD student of a superstar professor that talks to you five minutes once a month, and can advance your career path just fine.

I'm talking about the EU because it's where I am and can talk more or less confidently about, but this is probably true of many other countries and regions outside the US.

It's crazy to see how many people don't even consider this. I remember an Iranian researcher I was going to hire for a PhD position, she ended up going to the US because you know, it's the US... she faced the Trump ban and the PhD student tax hikes (here she would have a salary allowing her a middle-class lifestyle and without all those threats), and to this day she has significantly fewer papers than the person who had the second best CV and interview and I hired instead. Seriously, there is life outside the US!

Which institutes would you recommend for Engineering research?

I think your question is too general. For example, there may be institutions that have e.g. a great civil engineering lab while being mediocre at electrical engineering. And the same can be true of subfields of each engineering discipline (for example, I'm in CS, and it's common to see institutions that have a powerful group in one specific area of CS - say computer vision, robotics, NLP, theoretical CS - and aren't anything special in others).

I think you should look at what specific research you want to do and then check what labs are publishing interesting papers on that specific thing.

Perhaps I should have been more clear, I am a PhD dropout in Mech Eng with lots of CS and finance/econ exposure as I dropped out to join a bank. I want to do something cross disciplinary and vague ideas of systems science especially since I read Saltzer Kaashoek(sorry for butchering the spellings) Principles of Computer System design and sort of using a systems design approach to manufacturing processes and such. Like a lot of ideas of CS are from Engineering Management like JIT etc and how the design of networks is an evolution of earlier metaphors of telegraph and telephone systems.

To keep it short, how do I even find what I want to look for? Any tactics that you would want to suggest?

This is not a judgment on you. It sounds like you really challenged yourself, and may have done well in such a program.

This is just an explanation of how admissions offices work: Bio programs of any flavor at most halfway decent schools are so over-subscribed that there are far more people who exceed the minimum requirements than there are spots for them. Admissions offices have very limited resources to review enormous #'s of applications. 3.0 is a pretty good low-pass filter that eliminates a lot of those applications while still retaining applications from students who, from a probability standpoint, are most likely to succeed in the programs. Extra curriculars & volunteer work at labs show that you're willing to work hard, but not the quality of that work, so those become distinguishing factors only for students that already jumped the GPA hurdle. Academic success from someone with < 3.0 GPA would represent an outlier, and there are no good ways identify who those outliers are, and finding them isn't important when there are plenty of qualified applicants who are easier to identify.

There's probably lots of students in your boat who would have contributed well to the body of scientific knowledge. But for every one of them-- and I have literally seen these students-- there are dozens upon dozens that are let into more lenient programs, unable to do the work & burdened with $100k+ in debt & nothing to show for it.

> Biology-focused hacker spaces are on the rise so there are still ways to do research.

I am very interested in this concept. Are you thinking of any in particular? I really wish people invested in public spaces people could go do science, particularly chemistry.

I joined one called "BioCurious"[1] in the SF Bay area to work on a project making a fluorescence microscope. The project was advertised on Meetup.com which is how I found it, and there were other similar projects that met up weekly. If you paid a membership fee though you got 24/hr access so I met a person there outside of academia who was using the lab's resources to continue the neuroscience research he had done for his PhD.

In the bay area I also know of CounterCulture [2] which I've only heard high praise of but I've never visited. I've since moved to Baltimore and found some places I wanted to check out but unfortunately because of Covid I've been stuck at home.

[1] https://biocurious.org/ [2] https://www.counterculturelabs.org/

If you haven't seen it Lior Pachter at CalTech has been sharing open source / 3d printable designs for lab equipment [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/lpachter/status/1354955229532360707

Thank you!

Thanks for sharing. I'm in Baltimore, too. Please post these places if you have a chance. Would love to check them out when possible. Searching the web, I have found https://bugssonline.org/.

Hey, sorry for taking so long to respond to this.

When I moved here I made a list of hacker spaces that were both general and biology-focused. I thought I had found more that were focused on bio but unfortunately I think you're right, for biosciences it's only Baltimore Underground Science Space.

In Cambridge MA there is Bos Lab: (microbiology).

https://www.boslab.org/

Thank you!

I had a 2.97 cumulative GPA. I never did this, but someone told be to put 3.0, and if anyone ever challenges me on it, say "significant figures."

>Also, the Wright Brothers didn't need a research lab to invent flight.

That's only because all the low hanging fruits were still not picked, right? Many discoveries during that time and in the centuries before were done by individuals rather than institutions.

>> That's only because all the low hanging fruits were still not picked, right?

There's plenty of low hanging fruit as the industry grows wide.

While any given industry is subject to the asymptotic curve of progress, innovations in human biology have been incredibly slow due to bureaucracy and IRB slowdowns + grant model.

Human-powered flight wasn't considered a really good idea at the time of the Wright Brothers either, and many people died in the decades following it. It's only in hindsight these ideas seem obvious.

“Everything has already been invented” -1921 and 2021, some things don’t change ;)

So I'm no in the US so not familiar with your GPA system, but couldn't you just take one more class which you knew you'd do well at to push that over the line?

Yup, and I did consider it. But another semester of college just to boost my GPA would've been expensive. I don't have regrets how things turned out, but point is my story is common

Sounds like you weren't that motivated in the first place. Could have been a blessing in disguise to meet at hurdle sooner rather than later.

Not having financial means to waste more time in college has no bearing on the person's motivation.

Hah, I'm still motivated but I was also pretty aware of the other comments being made here about higher education at the time (excessively political, funding sparse, job search difficulties for bio fields). I was lucky enough to get a scholarship for 4 years of undergrad and graduated with low debt. The extra semester would have doubled my debt with no guarantee I'd be better off after.

I know things I could've done or could do now if I wanted to go back, but I think I'm more interested at the moment in how to make the research I want to do more accessible.

Could you share what are these bio hacker spaces, for example?

> GPA was 0.023 too low to pass the automated filters

Your application was most likely reviewed by real people, not just automated filters. People with GPAs below 3 do get into competitive grad programs (and med school). An upward trend is the key.

Maybe indeed. Maybe not. It‘s probably more nuanced and random than that.

I'm sure this happens to some people with the right combination of luck, perseverance, and recommendations. It's probably far more likely at your current institution as you already have relationships with professors who sit on the admissions committee. Particularly if you are already productive in a lab and the principal researcher goes to bat for you.

That doesn't change the OPs point that this is an uphill battle. If they didn't have the above, or they could only get into the right program then it still leaves them with better alternatives elsewhere. Harvard almost certainly filters all candidates with a GPA less than 3.0. Unfortunately academic grades have a poor correlation with future career or research performance.

Ah.. I don't think this comment deserved to be downvoted. I did actually have one place reach out -- a lab at U of Toronto. But they asked if I was international and when I said yes (USA) they apologized and said they didn't have funding to sponsor an international student. But yeah, all the other schools were faceless rejections

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