Getting Employment with Low-ish College GPA?

[nicksaiz65]

This year, I told myself that I would fix everything that I've done wrong in my life. One major thing that I need to do is graduate college, have that degree with my name on it. I want to show the world that Computer Science is indeed for me, and I CAN have a career in that field. I was struggling with college a lot, but I'm getting things turned around and getting my life together. My GPA by the time I graduate college will be around a 2.8. No lower than that for sure. Pretty decent GPA, nothing amazing though.

I was wondering, will this GPA screw me out of getting work? I do have internship experience as well. And I'm aware that you just need to get one job: after that you can erase your GPA off your resume forever.

I found this quote on College Confidential while I was doing some research:

"
I posted this a long time ago, I'll post it again:

To the extent that finding a job is a function of GPA (and it is a function of much, much more), for schools ranked roughly in the 10-50 range:

3.50+: Can work anywhere, and will be actively pursued for the best jobs out there
3.20-3.49: Can work anywhere, but will need to work to get the best jobs
3.00-3.19: Can work anywhere, but will generally be shut out of the best jobs
2.80-2.99: Will struggle to find work at large companies, can generally find work at smaller employers
2.50-2.79: Will struggle to find professional work, and such work will generally be low-paying and/or unpleasant, with limited prospects for advancement
2.00-2.49: Probably will not find professional employment in engineering
"

So the ideal strat for me would to be to work at a smaller programming company, erase my GPA, become a wizard programmer, keep paying off my debts, and then work my way into whatever companies I desire from there.

Have any of you all found this to be true? Just wanted to get some more opinions from the guys around here.

 

[Georgepithyou]

Your GPA doesnt matter, finding a job is about who u know not what you know.

Work on your networking skills

 

[mrgoodstuff]

Get a internship somewhere. They may just hire you later on. I'd get the grades up as high as you can get them.

Folks ain't really covering too many peoples "azz" with hook up jobs these days. It happens, but it's not as common. Get a internship so you have experience, plus you may hireon at that company and you will have experience on your resume.

 

[nicksaiz65]

Get a internship somewhere. They may just hire you later on. I'd get the grades up as high as you can get them.

Folks ain't really covering too many peoples "azz" with hook up jobs these days. It happens, but it's not as common. Get a internship so you have experience, plus you may hireon at that company and you will have experience on your resume.

Nice. I was a VR programmer in C# last summer, so I do have internship experience.

Would you recommend getting another one?

 

[mrgoodstuff]

Nice. I was a VR programmer in C# last summer, so I do have internship experience.

Would you recommend getting another one?

Yessir!!! Internships until you graduate. If you can get a related job near campus that will help too. I did all of that, and literally had 4 years of job experience before I graduated from college. Was making $20/hr on one of the jobs for 18 months and $14/hr on another for 9 months and this was way back in 1990 and 1991, minimum wage mighta been $4.25. You'll have a legit resume before you graduate. You can also end up going working for one of the companies you interned for.

I suggest doing whatever you can to get grades up, the key is not to fall behind, I think i said that. The use of tutoring will will help. In any class where you are having issues, use tutors. Never fall behind.

 

[nicksaiz65]

Yessir!!! Internships until you graduate. If you can get a related job near campus that will help too. I did all of that, and literally had 4 years of job experience before I graduated from college. Was making $20/hr on one of the jobs for 18 months and $14/hr on another for 9 months and this was way back in 1990 and 1991, minimum wage mighta been $4.25. You'll have a legit resume before you graduate. You can also end up going working for one of the companies you interned for.

I suggest doing whatever you can to get grades up, the key is not to fall behind, I think i said that. The use of tutoring will will help. In any class where you are having issues, use tutors. Never fall behind.

Great. I'll see if I can get another one after coronavirus is over.

I have some other chances to get experience as well... one of my teachers asked me to help him polish up his website. This will also be helpful because I'm taking CSC 3100, Web Programming over the summer. A good chance to practice what I learn in that class and have more experience on my resume.

Yeah I'm definitely trying to stay on top of my work. It's getting ridiculously crazy out here with finals. I'm nearly done with school this semester though.

I'm also working on some personal projects. With corona I've had more time to code. I've always wanted to build a synthesizer/VST since I'm interested in music technology. I'll put that on my resume as well.

 

[RickTheToad]

This year, I told myself that I would fix everything that I've done wrong in my life. One major thing that I need to do is graduate college, have that degree with my name on it. I want to show the world that Computer Science is indeed for me, and I CAN have a career in that field. I was struggling with college a lot, but I'm getting things turned around and getting my life together. My GPA by the time I graduate college will be around a 2.8. No lower than that for sure. Pretty decent GPA, nothing amazing though.

I was wondering, will this GPA screw me out of getting work? I do have internship experience as well. And I'm aware that you just need to get one job: after that you can erase your GPA off your resume forever.

I found this quote on College Confidential while I was doing some research:

"
I posted this a long time ago, I'll post it again:

To the extent that finding a job is a function of GPA (and it is a function of much, much more), for schools ranked roughly in the 10-50 range:

3.50+: Can work anywhere, and will be actively pursued for the best jobs out there
3.20-3.49: Can work anywhere, but will need to work to get the best jobs
3.00-3.19: Can work anywhere, but will generally be shut out of the best jobs
2.80-2.99: Will struggle to find work at large companies, can generally find work at smaller employers
2.50-2.79: Will struggle to find professional work, and such work will generally be low-paying and/or unpleasant, with limited prospects for advancement
2.00-2.49: Probably will not find professional employment in engineering
"

So the ideal strat for me would to be to work at a smaller programming company, erase my GPA, become a wizard programmer, keep paying off my debts, and then work my way into whatever companies I desire from there.

Have any of you all found this to be true? Just wanted to get some more opinions from the guys around here.

Wouldn't worry too much about it. I was a C student through HS and my guidance counselor told me to look into the trades instead of going to college. Went to the air force, then college, graduated with honors and I have an MBA all paid for by someone else. Don't let anyone or anything tell you that you cannot do something or you are not good enough. As long as you have direction and purpose, you'll be fine. A few questions.

1) Have you thought of joining the military?
2) What do you want to do with your life?
3) Are you good with your hands? If not, what ARE you good at?
4) Do you eventually want to run your own business? If so, what industry excites you?

 

[switch7]

I'm also working on some personal projects. With corona I've had more time to code. I've always wanted to build a synthesizer/VST since I'm interested in music technology. I'll put that on my resume as well.

Personal projects show you actually enjoy programming and aren't just after a pay check.. Keep doing this it's what gets you A better at programming and B the job. You'll get there if you show your're passionate, - don't worry.

 

[Alvafe]

serious did anyone ehre find a job because they had good grade in college? they don't even ask, only how much time you take to finish and where, all else is more about how well you sell yourself and how good you look, plus ace-ing they strange ridiculous "tests" during interview give you better chances.

other then that show knowledge and good work ethics, if all else fails open you bussiness yourself

 

[Georgepithyou]

Wouldn't worry too much about it. I was a C student through HS and my guidance counselor told me to look into the trades instead of going to college. Went to the air force, then college, graduated with honors and I have an MBA all paid for by someone else. Don't let anyone or anything tell you that you cannot do something or you are not good enough. As long as you have direction and purpose, you'll be fine. A few questions.

1) Have you thought of joining the military?
2) What do you want to do with your life?
3) Are you good with your hands? If not, what ARE you good at?
4) Do you eventually want to run your own business? If so, what industry excites you?

Not sure how it is in America, but in Australia the military offers a lot of great study and employment options.
Free university and you can get a good job like an Aeroplane engineer which pays a lot and is not taxed. They also help with housing costs.

 

[Papa_smu]

These are the steps to success which should be concurrently executed:

• If you don't have a portfolio site built, then drop everything you're doing and start building it. It's very easy throw together a sexy site and deploy it out into the wild. Check out these resources to build it quickly but still look like you built it on your own
  • Use a template to build your site, but make sure to build it from scratch while using the template you choose as an inspiration
    • https://startbootstrap.com/themes/portfolio-resume/
  • Take advantage of the cloud -- Netlify gives you everything you need to host and the process stupidly easy. They even provide free lambda functions to host your backend. It'll even secure your site with TLS 1.2 for free
    • https://www.netlify.com/
  • Once you have that setup, buy a domain name and point that sucker at your portfolio site. Also make it secure. You can find cheap domain names here
    • https://www.namecheap.com
• You maybe one year away from graduation but that isn't an excuse to not start reaching out to employers. If you want to get a decent first developer job, then you need to network immediately
  • Get on Linkedin and build out your profile. Make sure to fill everything out on your profile so it can better rank you in their search engine. Use this article as a resource:
    • https://blog.smarp.com/a-guide-to-optimizing-your-linkedin-profile-for-2019
  • Also do get a professional headshot. Having a professional picture carries a lot of value. You're experience maybe **** but you're damn beautiful HD portrait is going to at least get them to look at your profile.
  • When you fill everything out on the profile, order the sections this like this:
    • Education
    • Projects
    • Experience
    • Volunteer Experience
  • The reason why Education and Projects are first is because it's above the fold on the page and are your biggest money makers for now. You want to make as much as of impact as soon as possible.
  • Also make sure your portfolio, linkedin, and resume are consistent with each other. You will not be taken seriously if any of these are not congruent with each other.
  • Once you have your profile up and it looks GOOD then you need to start reaching out to other developers at the companies you want to work at
    • Look for senior developers or tech leads in your search. Once you find them, send them a connection request if you can.
    • Always, always, always include a personal note with the connection. You will get ignored if you don't
    • In that personal note, say something along the lines like this: "Hi [name], I'm currently a computer science student who is about to graduate soon and soon be new dev in the community. I was wondering if I could have five minutes of your time to pick your brain some"
  • Make it a goal to get 500 QUALITY connections. The more the connections you have, the better chances of appearing in search results
• If you have downtime from school, now is the great opportunity to start contributing to open source. A big thing in the workplace is having a mastery over version control systems. Specifically, distributed version control systems like Git. The best way to get at a level expected in the workplace is contributing to projects on Github:
  • https://github.com/
• Finally, start going to conferences even if they're virtual. They are all-around good for your career and with the coronavirus fiasco going on, there are a lot of them going virtual and have free entry.

If you do all these steps in parallel and you hustle, then you will get a job and even possibly do much better than your peers who have 4.0s and honors.

 

[nicksaiz65]

Wow. You really gave me the keys to the kingdom with this post lol.

I just saw the link you posted for the namecheap. I'll buy it. That's less than the sandwich that I'm going to buy from Publix tomorrow lol.

Considering that I'll be redesigning my teacher's website, and I'm taking CSC 3100 Web Development over the summer, this is even more good practice.

All the headshots I have at the moment suck unfortunately. Once this corona stuff blows over they actually offer free headshots at my school. They're through professional photographers, which is very nice.

I've gotten started on implementing some of those personal projects. I'm gonna keep talking about them in here as well, hopefully I can bounce some ideas off of you.

Open source.... that's definitely something I'm interested in working on. I know exactly what project I want to contribute to as well, LMMS, Linux Multimedia Studio. It's a digital audio workstation. It's missing a few bells and whistles though. I'd like to add in some new features. I used this when I was a kid, before I could afford FL Studio. So I think that would be really cool to do.

I was able to go to some developer conferences before this pandemic hit. But I'll have to look into these virtual conferences. It'd be a fun opportunity to learn something new. One topic I'm interested in is Data Science/Big Data. I'm sure I can find a conference that talks about these topics.

Wow... I've really got my work cut out for me. This is actually a ton. I'll have to work pretty much around the clock until December to get all of this done.

GitHub - LMMS/lmms: Cross-platform music production software

Cross-platform music production software. Contribute to LMMS/lmms development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[nicksaiz65]

I've never been in a situation where your bachelor's GPA matters much. I had a 2.7 gpa! Lmao. (But a 4.0 for my masters). Back in san francisco (the tech capital of the world) I knew 18 year old guys making $120k+ a year straight out of high school. They've been coding their whole lives and just took a coding bootcamp at a company like hack reactor for $15k and started working right away. I knew a guy who worked for pepsi with no college education who decided he just wanted to make games for apple. So he spent two years just messing around and making games for the apple store and now he is a lead engineer at apple making 200k a year.

Living in silicon valley, I didn't know any coder that went to college. Of course, the ones I knew were "real" coders who were making games at 14 years old, not "phony" coders who went into the stem field because they wanted chase the 6 figure salary.

College and GPA does not matter much in the tech field. You'll find out when you to go the interviews and they ask you complicated questions about solving complex algorithmic problems.

They will also want to see your portfolio to see how many projects you've been involved with, led, successfully launched, etc.

The only things that matter are skill, mindset, and experience.

All the top tech companies like Google and Apple no longer scavenge top universities looking for tech talent. They've realized there's very little correlation between educational background and actual tech talent.

Like I've said before, it's all about mindset. If you are of the ilk who thinks like "Man I got a project due, finals, I gotta make my resume look good, get my gpa up, impress my bosses, etc," you are going to suck at everything you do in life or barely survive at best.

But if your mindset is "I'm going to take over the damn company, change the culture, raise people to my level, nobody will outwork me, I will disrupt the game and take over my field, innovate and transcend the status quo", you will do more than survive. You would thrive. It doesn't matter what field you work in.

When you combine mindset with talent, it's a beautiful thing. The person is unstoppable and is destined to climb to the top of his field.

With the right mindset, you can be dropped off at a foreign country/island without knowing the language and somehow be able to make it to the top. Or come out of prison after 10 years with $100 to your name and within 5 years, make over 6 figures.

With a crappy mindset you can have everything working for you and still somehow struggle to survive, let alone thrive.

What I like to do is study successful coaches with multiple championships in their field like Nick Saban and Bill Belichick . The guys with borderline sociopathic will to win. Most of them have the same exact stoic philosophies. Whatever you do, you have to strive to be the best in the world at it. It could be something as simple as making your bed in the morning. Your attitude for making your bed will carry over to your attitude to doing everything else. If everything in your life is solid and squared away from your diet and excercise to your consistent effort in your work, you'll never ask another question about how to succeed. It would be inevitable.

You haven't started working yet so you think it's all about looking good on paper. But when you get into the real world, the bosses will want to see if you are a paper tiger or the real deal who's destined to take over. They would know right away just by observing how you conduct yourself in interviews. Your mindset would show up in you presence. Just like with women, there is no mask you can put on to fool executives that you are a dominant man with a dominant attitude. You have to live it everyday.

When you go on interviews, think of companies as teams of people on the same wavelength sharing the same mindset. They are going to grill you on not just your skillset, but what you are all about and intangibles you bring to the table like mindset and attitude. Not only do they want to see skill, they also want to see if you fit into their company culture. If you give off the presence of a thoroughbred winner, you might be able to get by with little experience. But if you give off a loser vibe, that's all they will see. The HR departments are trained to look for the exact fit to their companies. When you have two guys with similar skill, but one guy looks beta and the other guy is charming and gives off a leader vibe, who do you think they are going to choose?

P.S I work in the political field so I can't really dox myself too much on a seduction website, This is the kind of stuff that can come back and haunt me in the future, lol.

So just like with women, it all comes down to your mindset, or "inner game" if you will lol.

Yeah I've heard that interviews for Tech jobs can be really really complex. You've got to know how to implement those algorithms if you expect to do well.

I'm definitely working on that portfolio, just like Papa_Smu said to. Lots of work to get done.

That work ethic is definitely key, I'd say I've learned to cultivate that.

Thanks, storm. That encourages me while I keep putting my profile together.

 

[nicksaiz65]

Wouldn't worry too much about it. I was a C student through HS and my guidance counselor told me to look into the trades instead of going to college. Went to the air force, then college, graduated with honors and I have an MBA all paid for by someone else. Don't let anyone or anything tell you that you cannot do something or you are not good enough. As long as you have direction and purpose, you'll be fine. A few questions.

1) Have you thought of joining the military?
2) What do you want to do with your life?
3) Are you good with your hands? If not, what ARE you good at?
4) Do you eventually want to run your own business? If so, what industry excites you?

Sorry Rick, I totally thought I responded to you a couple weeks back. I was preparing for finals at the time so I think I lost this message in the shuffle.

1.) Not really, I'm not sure of the benefits? Although I do hear some good stories about military engineers or something like that?
2.) I want to be a great programmer, violinist, composer, and fitness guy.
3.) I've put together a few things, like sawhorses for my home gym, but eh, not too much. I'd say I'm good at the above: programming, music performance and composition, and so on. That's my purpose.
4.) Eventually, I would most definitely like to have my own business. I like the fields of Music Technology, Big Data, and Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence in Computer Science. And of course, the music industry. I'm interested in classical music, playing pop music and originals(I already do that with my band), composing classical music, writing beats, and making original EDM tracks. That sounds like a lot, but they're all under the same umbrella.

 

[nicksaiz65]

Personal projects show you actually enjoy programming and aren't just after a pay check.. Keep doing this it's what gets you A better at programming and B the job. You'll get there if you show your're passionate, - don't worry.

Most definitely. I'm working on contributing to open source on Linux Multi Media Studio and building a synthesizer using JUCE at the moment.

I'm going to be doing a LOT of C++ in the next few months.

 

[nicksaiz65]

Nobody ever asked me what my GPA was in a job interview, or anywhere, after college. (It was about the same as yours.) After I got a little work experience, people didn't even ask me where I went to college. No one cares. Luckily I went to a cheap state school.

That's good to hear... thanks friend this is all very re-assuring. I thought I was screwed for a bit lol.

Now to just put in the work.

 

[mrgoodstuff]

Hows your internship and near job search in your field going? You'll be surprised that some nearby jobs will hire you, your won't make a ton, but it'll allow you to build your resume.

 

[nicksaiz65]

Hows your internship and near job search in your field going? You'll be surprised that some nearby jobs will hire you, your won't make a ton, but it'll allow you to build your resume.

I've applied to two virtual internships that my school is offering due to corona. Waiting to hear back... they're both in security btw. Which is a really big field in computing these days. Although, I am in Software & Scientific Applications and not Cybersecurity. I still thought it would be good to apply.

 

[mrgoodstuff]

I've applied to two virtual internships that my school is offering due to corona. Waiting to hear back... they're both in security btw. Which is a really big field in computing these days. Although, I am in Software & Scientific Applications and not Cybersecurity. I still thought it would be good to apply.

For the job search we use hours a day every day. Id use at least an hr a day in your case on indeed, career builder, dice, and various companies job sites.

 

[nicksaiz65]

For the job search we use hours a day every day. Id use at least an hr a day in your case on indeed, career builder, dice, and various companies job sites.

I agree. And then, there's the time I need to spend learning and programming for my success plan as well. Not to mention preparing for these coding interviews so I don't make an ass of myself lol.