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ivy league wrote:
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Can confirm yes.
Obviously there are a lot of variables besides GPA.
Yeah I had ~3.75 (or 74, or 76, I forget) from a very mediocre state school and am an Ivy-league PhD program. Some in my cohort had as low as 3.2, I think. Informally I have heard profs say that they will look at any application above a 3.0, and that over a 3.8 is all that is "needed" for the top programs (in biophysics)
Recc letters matter a lot - so make sure you have close relationships with a few professors
Research experience is as or more important for the sciences - if you haven't had few years by the end of undergrad it may be worth it to take a year or two working as a research assistant somewhere. (If this is the case, unless you were working some other job to get by, ask yourself what you were doing all this time)
Depends, of course, but a 3.7 is not automatically a ding; I got in a top-ranked Ivy graduate program with barely a 3.0 UGGPA (though this was back in the day, and would be worth ~~3.5 now).
Your potential value to the department is key. Experience in research and teaching, demonstrated commitment to the field, recommendations from your UG profs--esp. if they have personal relationships with profs at your target school(s)--can all be important, as can your performance on GRE and other tests. (Actually, is GRE still a thing? Been quite a while since I took mine.)
I have a 3.7.
I have 4 solid LOR (all of which I have a good relationship with. ). Maybe 1 or 2 more.
Wrote a research proposal. Will present after research is done.
Hoorah!
Best of luck to you, OP.
Yes. Research experience is more important than GPA and letters of recommendation are important too. In general, 3.7 is a very good GPA, especially if your school maxes out at 4.0 for an A (no 4.3 for an A+ like some schools).
A note: PhD programs are not like undergrad. You are more-so looking for a PI/lab than you are a school. Premier programs in many fields are not at Ivy League schools.
GPA is not important for a PhD program. It’s mostly used as a filter if it’s very low like low 3’s and there isn’t a good justification for why.
Research experience, especially papers,
and letters are most critical at PhD admission stage as well as all the way up to getting a job when you graduate with a PhD.
3.7 is good enough that most readers won't pay attention to it (unless you have any particularly bad grades in core classes).
Most importantly, you need good research experience/accomplishments and must be able to articulate in a compelling way what your future scientific interests are, and why you want to go to grad school. Good LORs help too, but those are somewhat out of your hands at this point.
It's not that simple, as others have said.
I got into a Harvard PhD program with a 2.7 out of Stanford. The 2.7 masked my very high grades in evolutionary biology and anthropology, independent studies, etc. I had super recommendations, one from a world-famous evolutionary biologist. The admissions committee decided to take a chance on me, and I did just fine, and got my PhD.
This was a long time ago, though.
So . . . you need to find ways to show the department or program that you're very good at what they do. If in the rest of your studies you're not that good, they likely won't care. They're going to be looking at your entire transcript, not your overall GPA. Grad school is all about specialization.
And recommendations are super important. This is especially true if you're lucky enough to get one from somebody who knows people where you're applying (that was true in my case). They're going to pay more attention to a rec from somebody they know (and whose work and reputation they also know) than any old person from your current school.
What course of study are you applying to? Math, physics, and computer science, especially, tend to be more competitive at the top end. Also, some of the 'best' programs in those areas of study are a mix of Ivy and non-Ivy schools (eg. NYU and MIT for math and applied math; Carnegie Mellon for computer science; etc.).
If you're a white male, no! Not even a perfect SAT score will get you in.
runbuggy!! wrote:
Not even a perfect SAT score will get you in.
And no wonder! Only an idiot would take the SAT to try to get into grad school.