HyperSniper said:
Ugh, I feel like you. I'm actually really well read in philosophy and economics (Can't really put that on my resume though...), and people who talk and interact with me know I'm bright, but my grades aren't that great because I KNOW how irrelavent most of this stuff is to real-world engineering so it's hard to concentrate on working all the problems.
I'm really more of a conceptual guy, I don't do hand calculations that well (hence, low test grades), which really isn't that big of a deal in the real world because I'm pretty good with a spreadsheet and I can write code pretty well too.
However, no one wants to talk to me about an internship because I don't have any real experience and my GPA right now is only like a 2.8, it'll be above a 3.0 by the time I graduate, but I've worried that since I'm probably not going to have any substantial experience on my resume after I graduate that I'm going to have a tough time finding a job.
Maybe in the US and Canada they really care about grades. Maybe some of what I'm saying isn't that applicable to those of you not on my side of the Atlantic.
Here, grades seem to play a very minimal role in securing internships and jobs. The extra curriculars, sports, work experience (both relevant i.e. internships and other work e.g. part-time in a shop) and other skills play a much bigger role in getting to the interview stage. And the interview will then also be almost solely about these soft skills; you'll be given many group activities to complete, e.g. building the tallest paper tower, as well as presentations to give about a subject of your choice, and a whole range of other tasks to complete. I've never been asked a technical question in an interview, nor have my grades every been inquired about.
But then, as previously mentioned, my experience might not be too applicable to Americans and Canadians, primarily due to two reasons:
1) CV vs Resume: In North America, you have a resume; in the UK, you have a Curriculum Vitae (CV). A resume is essentially a much shorter version of a CV. I'm told that it is not convention to include all of your hobbies and interests in a resume (e.g. sports teams you are in and instruments you play), that you only include relevant work experience and educational background. A British CV is about twice as long, giving you much more space to write down all sorts of bull**** bigging yourself up - where it definitely IS the convention to include all of your hobbies and interests, for these are quite often what can give you the edge over other candidates.
2) GPA vs Degree Class: In America and Canada your grades are measured in GPA, which is a score out of four, and can be measured to the nearest decimal place. In Britain, we don't use that system. Instead, we have different classes of degrees: 1st, 2nd (subdivided into upper (2i) and lower(2ii)), 3rd, pass, and anything below that is a fail. A pass is only given out in exceptional circumstances where the student fails to achieve honours, but still did some work at least. So that leaves three different classes/grades of degree that a student here can be awarded. Now, due to the fact that British university is no longer just a finishing school for the wealthy to send their children to meet and breed with other wealthy families, and students actually attend lectures, only one or two percentage of students are lazy enough to get a 3rd class degree. So that narrows things down even more to there only being three realistic grades that a British student can get: 1st, 2i, 2ii. But then grade inflation happened at the lower end, pushing up a great deal of people from the a high 2ii to a low 2i. But this inflation isn't so apparent at the top, where the percentage of people being awarded first class degrees has barely risen at all in the last half century. So currently, about 60-70% of British students will get the exact same grade! So employers here are reading CVs and nearly everyone has the exact same grade, so stop caring.
Of course, I didn't suggest that anyone let their grades fall too low and that if they had good soft skills then it didn't matter. What I was saying was that if you are spending 2/3s of your day studying so you can get straight As then that is a bit of a waste of time as employers care about more than just grades, and that someone who put in much less study time and consequently has lower grades (although still not poor), but instead has a wealth of experiences and soft skills to draw upon, as well as other useful skills e.g. programming will be more impressive.
