Age as a factor in grad school admissions

kingjamesmvp
Wed, 15 Apr 2009 03:46:18 +0000

Hi,

I’m 19yo in my second year of college. Mostly because of college courses I took in high school (as well as APs) I’m eligible to graduate next fall (I’ll be 19 going on 20) with a ~3.5 in Asian American Studies. I’m familiar with the imprudence of going to graduate school without a concrete interest in any kind of subject, but I’m very taken with the idea of doing research projects, studying in a personalized and intensely focused way, and generally exploring my interests at a deeper level than just undergrad.

Anyway, my question is: should I take another two years and try to get a second major while boosting my GPA? The downside of this is that I’ve essentially already had 60+ credit hours of upper division undergraduate work and I feel motivated and ready to dive into more advanced stuff. The upside is that my GPA has been on a significant upward curve (considering I had a cumulative 2.5 my first two quarters after taking only upper division classes) and I would have more time to bring it up to something like a 3.7-3.8. While I’ve done a lot of reading on the boards and have familiarized myself with the idea that graduate school admissions do not necessarily emphasize GPA, I feel like this would increase my options in terms of top tier graduate school programs in fields like sociology or history.

My other option would be to apply to graduate school for the year after I graduate. The downside is that I’m not sure if my age and inexperience negatively impact my chances at the programs I’m interested in, which include the ethnic studies MAs at UCLA and UCB and the China Studies program at UWash. Also, my GPA is a little low (independent of mitigating circumstances, like the one listed above). The upside is that I’ve been working closely with four different professors (who received their MAs in cognate fields from Berk, LA, and Stanford) and their research assistants in graduate level settings who have offered to write me glowing letters of rec, and that, should I get into an MA program, I would have a graduate degree by the time I would “normally” be finishing college.

Thanks in advance for any advice.