- #1
irongoat333
- 5
- 0
Greetings All,
So I've received my first round of rejections from schools, and I must admit I am a bit surprised.
This is my second degree, with my first being in EE from 12 years ago. At that time I had pretty
severe (and documentable) mental health issues, and this really held me back academically, I did
very poorly but still graduated.
I spent a lot of time working and doing unrelated things, including the equivalent of an entire arts degree before returning to science, doing a specialist degree in biomedical physics. I've done substantially better in my 3rd and 4th year subjects, with my 3rd year being B/B+ ish grades and my 4th year being B+/Aish grades, and averaging among these classes I'm standing at a modest 3.4, from a pretty tough school. I also did a full year of experience in a research lab and did fairly well in this. I had two professors who were willing to write me good letters of recommendation, and thought that even with my modest GPA (3.4 in 3rd/4th and 3.0 cumulative, mostly due to the arts degree) that things would balance out and I would have a decent shot.
This isn't really the case, and I got two rejections after some very favorable exchanges with supervisors (who I was pretty clear with about all this before applying), and due to this, I'm seriously considering delaying my graduation and taking even more advanced classes in things that I got B's in, such as statistical mechanics and optics. I think perhaps if I can bring my cGPA up beyond 3-3.1, and also have
say 3.5 in my last two years, this could perhaps make a difference? Schools do define 'last two years'
as senior grades, and not strictly in terms of time? I've done things a bit out of order, but the grades
in my senior classes make a compelling case from my understanding. I also send all schools unofficial transcripts filtering out arts courses and simply putting year-by-year GPAs, to substantiate this case.
There's also part of me that worries my supervisor last year wrote me a bad letter of recommendation. My performance wasn't as great as expected (though I still did all things I was tasked with) mainly due to my father dying.
I'm at the point now where I don't know if I should even bother, or if my chances are just utterly shot. I would love to keep spending more money and time ploughing through undergrad, but its getting exhausting and expensive, and I'm starting to feel like this isn't going anywhere. The two programs that
rejected me had very generic, and unspecific feedback - one simply said 'low grades', the other said 'skills mismatch'. I followed up with a request for more details, but nothing has come back since.
If I knew for instance that I was on the fence (the school with the low grades comment had a supervisor that seemed keen on talking to me about his project) I wouldn't hesitate to work harder and reapply.
Anyway, is there any hope in all of this or would I be better to just cut my losses? I really love this work in spite of all the challenges, and am really hoping I can find some good reasons to try again with more challenging classes and reapply.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
So I've received my first round of rejections from schools, and I must admit I am a bit surprised.
This is my second degree, with my first being in EE from 12 years ago. At that time I had pretty
severe (and documentable) mental health issues, and this really held me back academically, I did
very poorly but still graduated.
I spent a lot of time working and doing unrelated things, including the equivalent of an entire arts degree before returning to science, doing a specialist degree in biomedical physics. I've done substantially better in my 3rd and 4th year subjects, with my 3rd year being B/B+ ish grades and my 4th year being B+/Aish grades, and averaging among these classes I'm standing at a modest 3.4, from a pretty tough school. I also did a full year of experience in a research lab and did fairly well in this. I had two professors who were willing to write me good letters of recommendation, and thought that even with my modest GPA (3.4 in 3rd/4th and 3.0 cumulative, mostly due to the arts degree) that things would balance out and I would have a decent shot.
This isn't really the case, and I got two rejections after some very favorable exchanges with supervisors (who I was pretty clear with about all this before applying), and due to this, I'm seriously considering delaying my graduation and taking even more advanced classes in things that I got B's in, such as statistical mechanics and optics. I think perhaps if I can bring my cGPA up beyond 3-3.1, and also have
say 3.5 in my last two years, this could perhaps make a difference? Schools do define 'last two years'
as senior grades, and not strictly in terms of time? I've done things a bit out of order, but the grades
in my senior classes make a compelling case from my understanding. I also send all schools unofficial transcripts filtering out arts courses and simply putting year-by-year GPAs, to substantiate this case.
There's also part of me that worries my supervisor last year wrote me a bad letter of recommendation. My performance wasn't as great as expected (though I still did all things I was tasked with) mainly due to my father dying.
I'm at the point now where I don't know if I should even bother, or if my chances are just utterly shot. I would love to keep spending more money and time ploughing through undergrad, but its getting exhausting and expensive, and I'm starting to feel like this isn't going anywhere. The two programs that
rejected me had very generic, and unspecific feedback - one simply said 'low grades', the other said 'skills mismatch'. I followed up with a request for more details, but nothing has come back since.
If I knew for instance that I was on the fence (the school with the low grades comment had a supervisor that seemed keen on talking to me about his project) I wouldn't hesitate to work harder and reapply.
Anyway, is there any hope in all of this or would I be better to just cut my losses? I really love this work in spite of all the challenges, and am really hoping I can find some good reasons to try again with more challenging classes and reapply.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.