Worried About Your University’s GPA? Why STEM Majors Shouldn’t Be Too Concerned About Grades & Should Focus on what Really Matters Instead?
By: Juan Moctezuma-Flores
Tags: STEM, College, University, Students, Education

Worried About Your University’s GPA? Why STEM Majors Shouldn’t Be Too Concerned About Grades & Should Focus on what Really Matters Instead?

Photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash

Society has taught us that part of being successful implies obtaining high grades and doing well in school. I’m here to tell you to relax! If you are a currently majoring in Engineering, Computer Science, Math or any other Science, I want to let you know that as long as you are not pursuing a career in Academia or an advanced degree, you shouldn’t feel too bad if your GPA is not that impressive due to C’s or occasional D’s.

You are not less intelligent just because you didn’t do well on some final exam. If you graduated recently, it might be too late to fix that but in the end, grades don’t mean much to potential employers.

I’m not saying you should completely stop caring about school or suggesting that you drop out of university, but the reality is that the vast majority of companies will not care about your GPA. Yes, there a few cases in which job descriptions require you to include both your major and cumulative GPA on your resume, but luckily most of them won’t need you to so.

Grades don’t matter too much, and instead you should focus on the following:

First and foremost, figure out exactly what type of job title or position you are looking for. Unfortunately in most cases there’s not a lot of connection between Academia and the workforce. Unless your school has some sort of joint program with a company that directly prepares students for particular roles, then disregard the previous statement. The truth is, in most cases the staff or faculty from your respective major’s department will not be able to help you if you don’t even know what to do with your degree in the first place. Therefore use Google to do your research and see what’s appealing to you! If you realize that the type of job you are looking for doesn’t necessarily require a 4-year Bachelor Degree, then you should consider other alternatives such as obtaining an Associate Degree or the necessary certification for the particular occupation or career goal.

Get involved with your community. You should either actively do community service / volunteering, become a board member of a student organization or fraternity, contribute to open source, or engage with relevant extracurricular activities that are offered by your institution. Employers need individuals that have efficient interpersonal abilities or leadership skills, since companies prefer people that can efficiently work with other individuals (co-workers, clients, etc.). It is certainly more impressive to include on your resume the fact that you were able to successfully collaborate with other individuals and accomplish whatever goals you and your team had.

Get an internship. Whether it’s a paid or unpaid internship, employers typically want candidates to have some experience in addition to a college degree. I know it’s a lot of work to even find an one but the truth is that an internship or real-world experience in any industry is far more relevant that theoretical knowledge taught on a classroom. Warning! Keep in mind that most internships offered by companies, require it’s candidates to be full-time students. Meaning that once you graduate you most likely won’t be eligible for internships, some employers allow recent grads to apply but not too many unfortunately. This situation is extremely uncomfortable for most of us, since most people can’t handle the amount of work from school and looking for experience since job hunting is already a full-time activity, but as I mentioned earlier internships are important and grades aren’t.

You definitely must learn Microsoft Office and some knowledge in relational databases. No matter what type of STEM career you are pursing, knowing Excel, Word and PowerPoint are essential for the majority of jobs because at some point you’ll most likely encounter these tools. Fortunately, these tools aren’t too difficult to learn. Are you wondering why I mentioned relational or SQL databases? Because everything is data (information) and this commonly gets stored in places. Please note that most companies prefer SQL databases over non-relational ones. Maybe you end up in a role that doesn’t require these knowledge associated with the previously mentioned tools but it will certainly help you more than Calculus does…

Get some certificates in addition to your degree. I know for many it’s annoying to increase the amount of studying but certificates will always help you depending on the role that you are looking for. Keep in mind that some certificates’ prices and quality vary depending on the institution that is offering them. Not all certificates are created equal and most have an expiration date since skillsets get rusty too!

You must have technical self-initiated projects that ideally reflect originality and make use of critical-thinking abilities. For you to demonstrate your creativity and technical acumen, you must need to develop projects using the tools that potential employers are most familiar with. Ideally you can apply some knowledge from school courses that you’ve taken too. However, avoid including school projects… this is your chance to be unique from everyone else and many other candidates will most likely have the same academic projects as you. In this blog post I won’t provide a specific guide on how to create a project since that is up to you to figure out! The only hint that I can provide is that you’ll need to open a Github account (it’s free) in order for you to store your projects, and embed your projects’ URL into hyperlinks within your resume.

Summary

Establish your career goals before anything else.

Do voluntary work and “get involved” (ideally in something related with your field).

Get an internship (or try getting one as soon as possible).

Definitively learn Microsoft Office and SQL Databases.

Get certificates (ideally in things related to your desired job).

Build technical self-initiated projects.

Conclusion

The truth is employers are more interested in knowing if you have the skills to do the job and (occasionally) if you are legitimately interested in their company, products or services. In addition, the only way to out stand within the pool of applicants is by doing the extra work mentioned on the previous bullet points.

I can assure that most job descriptions that you see posted on the internet right now require a Bachelor’s Degree but guess what? The degree itself is only the MINIMUM requirement for you to be eligible to apply for that role. Several decades ago you could apply for jobs with nothing else than your good old college degree but those days are over!

Nobody really knows for sure what potential employers want, but as long as you take the time to prepare yourself (even if you already graduated) and showcase your abilities and interests then you should be fine. The last advice I can provide is that the sooner you get prepared the better and ideally be sure to have a lot of the aspects that I mentioned accomplished before you graduate.

I know it’s a lot of work and the good things are typically those that are hard to obtain, but these won’t arrive anytime soon if you spend too much time focusing on school grades.