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yet another admission chances question...

Posted: Tue Jul 14, 2009 5:47 pm
by jb
I'm going into my senior year at a big public university with a pretty good physics department (very highly ranked graduate program). I'm applying to places this fall for phd programs, and with a low gpa I wanted to see what people thought of getting admitted into decent programs. My major gpa is a 3.3, but I have really good research experience on an international collaboration experiment at a particle accelerator (this is extremely relevant because I want to study high energy physics) and an english major in addition to physics. Im studying a lot for the pgre, so Im hoping to get a good score.

With a low major gpa of 3.3, is it possible to get into some decent programs? Im not sure where these rank because outside of the obvious Harvards and Standfords its hard to get a sense of rankings, but some schools on my list include: Temple University, Northeastern, BU (probably my top choice and a reach), Tufts, Drexel, Brandeis, NYU (reach), Rutgers, Carnegie Mellon. Any thoughts on my chances would be appreciated.

Re: yet another admission chances question...

Posted: Tue Jul 14, 2009 6:09 pm
by Mataka
It's hard to tell with what you tell us. Look at the profile section, and if that doesn't help well, try to build a profile using the template of the profile section, then with that we might be able to make an "accurate" judgment.

Re: yet another admission chances question...

Posted: Tue Jul 14, 2009 6:35 pm
by jb
I havent taken any of the gre's yet, but my physics gpa is a 3.3, english gpa is a 3.5, and I have research experience with a professor on an experiment at the fermilab accelerator. I know its hard to tell without any gre scores, but is my gpa a dealbreaker for most of those schools? From what Im seeing on here almost all of the profiles have gpas >3.7.

Re: yet another admission chances question...

Posted: Tue Jul 14, 2009 7:34 pm
by nathan12343
GPA isn't everything. You can prove that you know your stuff by doing very well on the PGRE, e.g. better than 850 or so.

Start studying now and those kinds of scores are perfectly reasonable.