Comment by don-code | Hacker News Reader

Comment by don-code | Hacker News Reader

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Indeed it could have. I was on a fairly prestigious scholarship; luckily, my marks were good enough that this was a low-risk decision.

That said...

I graduated with a 3.2 GPA, after being the stereotypical "gifted" student up through high school. A 3.2 is, apparently, still decent. However, I did feel a bit of a twinge seeing my peers walk at graduation with with cords, bents, and other regalia, where I just had my standard-issue black robe.

It had less to do with my grade in this particular class, and more to do with the fact that I had a part-time engineering job - 10-20 hours a week - and was making money. When you've spent a couple of years being broke, having an extra few hundred dollars per month was a big deal. Enough so that I didn't really care about putting the extra effort in for A's - that extra time was time better spent working. B's were fine if I could afford to take my girlfriend out to dinner every month.

In the years since then, it seems like this was a good decision. That job became full-time after college, and I stayed there six years. At the end of six years, nobody really cared about my college GPA. At the end of nine years (when I next looked for a job), I didn't even bother listing it on my resume.

Message for engineering undergraduates: when you have an opportunity to trade great grades for good grades and increased immediate career prospects, take it.

Your internship / prospective employer cares way more about the job you're doing for them than +0.5 GPA.

(If you're heading right to grad school, obviously different weighting)

If you're heading to grad school, it can be essential to have connections made through UG research. That's a trade that isn't just advised in some fields, but necessary. A letter of recommendation that says you're actually useful as an RA is 1000x more of a direct implication that they would benefit from bringing you on than an A in a few classes. Academics don't like finding out that smart people are impossible to work with any more than industry does, and since they're tied to you for longer, in some ways it's an even bigger deal.

You'll have a hard time getting an internship if you don't meet an arbitrary GPA cutoff.

Yeah, I'm not going to say that undergrad doesn't matter, but your grades are not exactly an indication of whether or not you're getting useful life and professional skills out of it. I was a straight-A high school student, but finished university a semester late with a 2.975 GPA. I've since had a wildly successful career in software development (my degree is in electrical engineering), and my college years toiling about in labs are but a dim memory.

Certainly the name of the school on my resume helped me interview for my first job, and I did learn a bunch about how computers worked and how to design CPUs, and that was useful early in my career when I worked on embedded software (like actually embedded, weak-ass MIPS machines with a handful of MB of RAM, and no MMU or memory protection[0]; not the tiny supercomputers that count as "embedded" these days). But my grades, and most of the getting-my-coursework-done drama? Irrelevant.

[0] And I'm sure some folks here will consider what I had to work with a luxury.

I probably learned more in my first year of working than I did in my degree. Not just technical skills and gaps that had been glossed over during study, but also about myself as an individual. You made the right choice, and it's one I wish I had the foresight and maturity to have made at that point in my life.

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