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Ask HN: Is it possible to get into grad school with mediocre grades?

5 points by fooandbarify ↗ HN
So let's imagine that some hypothetical person is approaching the final year of his or her electrical engineering degree, and the prospect of graduate studies has recently become alluring. If that person does not have very good grades (below the guidelines for admission), is it still possible for them to get into graduate school? How?

Edit: Also curious about different countries. I'm in Canada - how difficult would it be to get into a program in the US or Europe and what are the pros and cons in your opinions? I realize that a lot of this information is available elsewhere but I'm eager to hear the HN version.

10 comments

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bartonfink
I got into grad school with an unrelated bachelor's, so I know it is in fact possible. I did it by kicking ass on the GRE, agreeing to take an entrance exam (they stapled several final exams from their undergrad CS curriculum together) and then being on a provisional basis for the first year. Like Randy Pausch said, the brick walls aren't there to keep us out - they're there to give us a chance to show how bad we want in.
fooandbarify
Wow, thanks. That's encouraging. If you don't mind me asking, how unrelated was your bachelor's? And from what school? What sort of references did you provide? And did you get in right after your undergrad, did you have applicable industry experience, etc?
bartonfink
No problem - happy to help.

My bachelor's degree was in Latin, my master's was in Computer Science. I took a bit of a dive in terms of prestige, though. I went to Wake Forest University on a full academic scholarship for college, and went to UNC-Greensboro (an offshoot of the UNC you've probably heard of) for grad school. Like I said, it's a bit of a dive but I didn't exactly have the sort of application necessary to storm the gates at a first rate institution. I just wanted something that said "computer science" on it to stop the weird ?'s about my Latin degree.

My references were a couple of managers from a software internship as well as one of my favorite professors from Wake for academic chops. I didn't take any computer science at Wake, so there weren't any relevant profs I could have pinged.

I didn't get in right after my undergrad degree - I graduated college in '05 and didn't start grad school until '07. I had about 15 months experience as a software developer when I applied - one year as an intern and then roughly three months with another company. I'm not sure whether that helped sway the admissions committee, but it did paint a sign on my back with the other students as the guy who could always help if they had a programming or systems ?.

fooandbarify
Cool, that is also encouraging. I'd like to work for a while to gain experience and hopefully pay off some debt but most people say it's harder to get into grad studies when you've been out of the system for a bit. As long as harder != impossible, I'm okay with that.
_delirium
PhD or Masters? For PhD, finding some way to get the attention of a specific professor can help a lot at some institutions. It varies, but many do a two-tier admission system, where first they basically rubber-stamp the admission of students who a prof has said they want to supervise, and then in a second round the usual admissions committee admits a general pool of students who aren't attached to a specific advisor yet.

One way to do that is to look at research group webpages; some actively say that they're looking for PhD students in a specific area (usually because they just got a big grant).

fooandbarify
That's very useful information - I didn't realize some institutions worked that way. Do you have any insights with regards to getting the attention of a specific prof?
gyardley
When I was admitted to graduate school, I read up on each target professor's research, asked them relevant questions, met some at academic conferences, and made sure each knew I was applying to that graduate program to work directly with them before I sent my application in.

I also made sure I wasn't wasting my time applying to work with professors who were going on sabbatical or not accepting new graduate students.

Of course, this was for a history Ph.D., but I suspect the same advice holds elsewhere.

fooandbarify
Thanks, that's helpful. Did you limit your targets to professors working where you did your undergrad or did you try to cast a wider net? If so, did it work?
gyardley
No, I targeted professors at the absolute best schools possible, because I was considering a career in academia at the time and you can't get a tenure-track job with a second-tier Ph.D.

I got accepted at every school I applied to, but my application itself was pretty strong, so it's hard to say if the outreach 'worked' vs. another aspect of the application.

bmm6o
It's possible, but you need your application to stand out in another way. Do well on the GRE's and get a strong recommendation from a prof. Then apply to multiple programs - all you need is for one of them to admit you.