I had an A average -- I could have had an A+ average, but I was too busy {publishing research papers, calculating the quadrillionth bit of Pi, writing the Putnam, playing violin in symphony orchestras} and knew that with the rest of my academic record, nobody would care if I had an A average or an A+ average.
I was right -- in the 7 years since I graduated it has been everything I did in addition to taking classes which has gotten me places, not my grades in the courses themselves. Every year, at every college in the world, there's someone who graduates with the highest GPA. If you want to make yourself stand out more than that -- to make the point that you are not just the best of your year, but the best of the decade -- you need something other than just GPA.
My classes are probably the least interesting part of college for me. Being in an environment full of various really interesting bleeding-edge developments kicks ass though. I work in neurobiology, code whatever projects are interesting to me, calculate methods for signaling between autonomous vehicles, and am 5 minutes away from talking to someone right in the middle of solving problems in quantum physics or international affairs.
And then I go to class. Oh well. I suppose college isn't perfect.
I agree. Thou a 3.0 and higher GPA demonstrates commitment to work.
You have to be either really stupid or lazy (or smoking too much pot) to get a lower GPA than that.
I'd say, the perfect GPA is something around 3.5+ If you are 4.0 (or almost), there is a good chance you either didn't have enough fun, or didn't do other things in the side while at school. Not a very balanced person. even geniouses get A- or Bs once and a while.
A person that gets only A = annal retentive personality.
No way....a 4.0 just tells you that a person did really well with their course load, not that they were Ted Kaczynski wannabes.
I still remember the smartest person I ever met (I would be willing to bet that he'd do pretty well on any math test - Putnam included - you gave him). This fellow had the highest GPA in electrical engineering and also had the second highest GPA in economics. Simultaneously.
And on the side, he was an active skydiver and practiced jui-jitsu 2x a week. And over the course of the 4 years we spent in undergrad, I don't think I ever saw him study (I'm not exaggerating).
So it is possible to be off the charts intelligent and not be anal retentive or unbalanced.
"Thou a 3.0 and higher GPA demonstrates commitment to work. You have to be either really stupid or lazy (or smoking too much pot) to get a lower GPA than that."
Or you studied engineering at Georgia Tech or Berkley or, well, anywhere else. And 'thou' definitely doesn't mean what you think it means.
Your GPA doesn't mean much in the world, but your TOEFL score does.
"Or really bored with the work assigned." == lack of commitment to work.
In real life, even in startups, there are boring stuff that have to get done.
I remember, on one of my math classes which was easy (let's say I took Calculus 3, and then this easy class to finish off my minor), I slept on most of it, yet I managed to show up in tests and (to my suprise) got a B.
The girl that I had been helping on her homework all semester got an A.
Bascially my B showed my laziness for petty work, and not necesary intelligence.
So, GPA is 2/3 a display of your commitment to work (somebody that finishes off a given task), and 1/3 intelligence (some people, no matter how commited they are, are not smart enough to get all A's).
Your college years should have two practical benefits. You should be learning a lot, and you should prove to your future employer ( or investor) that you can get stuff done.
The default way to do this is to get great grades, which covers both bases. But other paths are often much more worthwhile. You can start an organization or become the leader of one. You can do a startup. You can film your documentary, produce an album, or write for newspaper - the imagination is the limit.
Make sure that you finish the project. Otherwise, you can't prove to others and yourself that you can actually bear down and gut something out.
I got a 3.2 GPA because I wouldn't do school work I didn't thought was necessary. If I didn't need to do problem sets to learn the material and ace the tests, I would just skip them and take the hit to my grades. Instead I spent time working on software projects that actually launched. This proved that I could get things done and resulted in great job offers.
>In real life, even in startups, there are boring stuff that have to get done.
Sure, but the payoff for the boring stuff in startups is much bigger. The boring stuff in startups needs to be done so you can make millions of dollars. The boring stuff in college needs to be done so you can get a job paying tens of thousands of dollars a year.
It is impossible to commit to work when you see something more interesting that could be worked on that would teach you much more. The existing work becomes tedious and dissatisfying. You begin to resent the existing work because it cuts into your time.
Example: I'd like to learn all about Scheme and Common Lisp. The courses I'm taking teach Perl, PHP, and C++. Can you spot the difference?
"and then this easy class to finish off my minor), I slept on most of it, yet I managed to show up in tests and (to my suprise) got a B."
The classes I think are easy are the ones that scare me. I've had a couple experiences where I thought a class was not going to be challenging and ended up with a worse grade than classes where the material was harder.
I didn't get good grades until grad school. Undergrad was too
useless to me and I didn't get interested in any of the material presented before senior year. But electrical engineering is a useless major anyway. An artifact of the 20th century.
Electrical Engineering is useless? Assuming you majored in it, I find it almost impossible to imagine believing this statement.
Not only is electrical engineering possibly the hardest engineering degree offered, it is probably also the most important. I mean, honestly, pretty much every advancement in computer technology is a direct result of EE. The rest is mostly physics. And honestly, at the high end of EE, there's very little difference.
What can I say. The coherence of a degree depends entirely on the set of classes you elect to take. Personally, I took a pretty wide variety, and enjoyed learning a lot of different things.
I got a masters degree in Electrical Engineering, mostly digital systems work. I learned to build a large number of highly interesting things. In fact, built a lot more in EE than I ever did in CS. Despite the fact that I now work writing web software, my degree is still highly applicable.
I agree with you on the difficulty, believe me. If you make it through that curriculum almost anywhere, you are the real deal. Read my reply to falsestprophet for the rest of the response.
Electrical engineering is interesting from an applied physics/mathematical standpoint. From the point of view of day-to-day work, a large segment of it has been reduced to providing a life support system for the microprocessor, which, you guessed it, runs software. Almost every EE I know is a programmer. Analog electronics, one of my early interests, has been pretty much reduced to power supply design and maybe some mixed-signal modem design. On the low end, there are advances in materials that enable Moore's law, but this is more applied physics than EE. Control theory jobs are almost nonexistent outside academia.
A lot of the higher level mathematics is cool: I personally liked dsp and stochastic systems but it got repetitive. Most CS programs offer similar math anyway. I wanted to go deeper into how the math was developed.
In short, the traditional electrical engineering field is being heavily encroached by software and the high end math isn't interesting enough. Which is why, if I had to do it all over, I would have done math, CS, physics, a lot of chem, and maybe an EE course or two. Boucher is right, it is a very difficult major, but boot camp is difficult too. I just wish it were more relevant to what is going on.
Sorry, I didn't address the 80k hopefuls. I would say that given the economic trends (ee is easier to outsource than software and is being replaced by it) that the long-term growth prospects don't look good salary wise.
The 80 k entry salaries are dubious unless they plan on using their school name to get a non-ee high paying job (read consulting, hedge fund, finance, etc). 60 is probably more realistic in my area (mid-Atlantic east coast) at the high-end entry level. In the most inflated market (the valley), seems like 100k is reasonable after 3-5 years experience (non consulting). A lot of them want advanced degrees. Of course, most of the jobs are software: http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=302...
I was right -- in the 7 years since I graduated it has been everything I did in addition to taking classes which has gotten me places, not my grades in the courses themselves. Every year, at every college in the world, there's someone who graduates with the highest GPA. If you want to make yourself stand out more than that -- to make the point that you are not just the best of your year, but the best of the decade -- you need something other than just GPA.