Application Process. Finding the Right Program. Getting Accepted. Thinking About Finishing College. More advice. Getting involved on campus is a great way to find support, have fun, and succeed in college. Here are a few ways to stay connected to your campus community! Read more. Thinking about finishing college? Hear from our experts on why it might be easier than you think.
It's never too late to get your degree. You can also demonstrate skills mastery via work experience.
Look for internships, research assistantships, volunteer opportunities, and other professional leads that will help you acquire hands-on experience in your prospective graduate field.
If you do original research, work on an exciting project, or otherwise make a contribution to your field, then write about it—and get your work published! Showing that you can pass muster in peer review will be a significant plus for your candidacy. Write a thoughtful, clearly formulated statement of purpose in which you communicate—by showing, not telling—your understanding of and passion for your chosen field.
Write with specificity about the research you hope to do in graduate school. Demonstrate your familiarity with the faculty by expressing how—and why—you hope to work with a few specific professors. If, for instance, you had a family emergency one semester, you can explain that your grades fell due to those personal circumstances—but in that case, committees will probably want to see that you successfully pulled them back up.
Most graduate programs ask for recommendation letters. Your recommenders can discuss your qualifications, including your GPA, and make the case for the kind of work you are capable of doing and have done for them!
Say you have a GPA on the low side, but your environmental bio research project really blew your professor away. If she recommends you as someone with great potential for research, her endorsement can significantly strengthen your application. In short: There are several ways to overcome a low GPA. Even if he manages to get straight A's during that semester, his GPA will still only be 2.
College applications put together the pieces to solve the puzzle of you. Did you know that although the GPA is very important, it is only one part of the many different things admissions officers take into account?
Focusing on these other pieces of the application is a key strategy for offsetting a low GPA. It's no wonder they are another key component of your college application—and that having high test scores greatly improves your application! For example, imagine Stella, who would love to go to the University of Georgia.
Unfortunately, her not-so-great work habits resulted in a GPA of 3. But, if she busts her derriere over months to get a , her chances of getting in go up to almost 50! To find our admissions tools for other schools, just Google "[name of school] admissions prepscholar" for example, "UCLA admissions prepscholar".
The majority of college applicants are high school seniors, and most of the college application advice out there is aimed at them. But what do you do if you don't fall into this narrow category? Our eBook on how to prepare for and apply to college as a nontraditional student will walk you through everything you need to know , from the coursework you should have under your belt to how to get letters of recommendation when you're not a high school senior.
It makes no sense to judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree—so admissions officers don't judge applicants only on their academics. If they did, they would miss applicants who have other amazing qualities. If you have skills and talents that don't show up on your transcript, make sure your application makes a big deal out of these other accomplishments.
Colleges will be impressed and can even infer that spending so much time on your other talents may have caused your grades to fall a bit. If you're a junior or have the summer before senior year, it's not too late to improve your extracurricular depth.
Figure out what you're interested in and good at, and try to take it to the next level. Read our guide to getting into the top schools in the country for more examples of how to do this. Another way to show off your non-academic talents is to take a gap year between high school and college. However, this only makes sense if you have an opportunity for really meaningful travel, an internship, or a job that will make you a more appealing applicant. So, taking a year off to surf is probably not the best idea.
But, taking a year off to teach English to kids in Ecuador or to participate in AmeriCorps could be just what your application—and your sense of personal achievement and maturity—needs. We can help. PrepScholar Admissions is the world's best admissions consulting service. We combine world-class admissions counselors with our data-driven, proprietary admissions strategies.
If and when it does, consider one of these strategies. In this case, talk about your major GPA on your resume and in interviews. This approach serves a dual purpose: It puts your cumulative GPA in its proper context, and it shows employers you are capable of earning good grades if you're studying something that engages you. Suppose, for example, your grades were terrible freshman year and only improved enough sophomore year for you to stay in school. Then junior year, you got serious and began performing much better academically.
Your cumulative GPA at graduation might not truly reflect how well you did in your classes during your junior and senior years, and even your major GPA might not tell the whole story. So consider calculating your GPA for your last four semesters in school, then sell that number to prospective employers.
At most institutions, you have the option of retaking courses that didn't go well for you the first time. If you do better the second time, only the second grade is used to calculate your GPA.
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