Can you give me possible solutions to my issue? I went to community college right after high school because I wanted to go to a good business school (I had a good high school gpa although my one year was not the best but I still brought it up). I realized after that those colleges dont really take community college students but I still applied and didnt get in. My GPA in community college was 3.94 where I received 2 B’s (due to personal issues) my first semester and straight A’s all other 3 semesters. My aim was to get into a good business school since I wanted to get into Finance. However, I realized that getting into a good business school from community college is hard although those reputed schools do like community college students for their other majors. Maybe I should have been more strategic and applied to their Economics program but I didnt know this was an issue then. Also getting those 2Bs probably didnt help. So I decided that I will go to a not so competitive university to get into which is a college in my city that’s got good internship/work opportunities. I will be studying Finance. I am unsure of whether or not I should go because I am afraid that my chances of getting into a top b-school at least for my MBA will become very slim, especially since I went to a community college my first two years and didnt have striaght A’s my first semester. Most people who attended top MBA programs from cc transferred to reputed colleges (from what I’ve seen) even if they couldnt maintain straights A’s although they didnt really attend business programs. I dont know if I should just take a gap year and start all over again. I know this may sound as if I am thinking too far ahead I’m not sure but I don’t want it to be too late. It seems like all the stories I’ve heard about cc transfers are success stories. Any tips? Thanks!
I think that more information would help us give better advice.
What state do you live in?
What is your budget? What is your budget without taking on any debt at all?
What was your unweighted GPA for each year of high school, calculated on a scale of A=4, B=3, C=2, and so on?
What are you doing right now? Have you just started at a university? If so, then what is the university?
I have known people who started off way worse than you did and ended up being quite successful in life. There are a lot of very good universities. There are also a lot of different definitions of “quite successful”.
I live in PA. My unweighted GPA was 3.92. I just started university at Drexel and they are known for their co-ops. Regarding my budget, since I went to a cc I was able to save a lot of money. I’ll be paying around 30k a year at drexel with loans but we do co-ops while in school which is supposed to also help pay for tuition.
Also thank you so much for responding!!
Coops are going to be very important in multiple ways. One way is that after you get some experience in a work / coop environment, what you are learning in class will be easier to relate to reality. You will also get some good experience to put on your resume. You will gain connections that might be useful to help you find a job (either by hiring you directly, providing references, and/or by introducing you to other potential employers).
It sounds to me like you are in a pretty good situation right now. High grades and good coop experience should help you. This plus a bit of work experience should help you get into good graduate programs, such as a good MBA program. My experience in graduate schools (including experience of other people who I know) suggests that the highly ranked graduate programs do accept students coming from a rather wide range of undergraduate schools.
By the way, my master’s degree was in Operations Research, which is a sub-field of applied mathematics which overlaps with business math. Finance of course is also a major that overlaps with applied math. You might want to just look at what Operations Research is and see whether it is interesting to you.
Thank you for your response! I would really like to go into PE as it is a more operational field in finance. I know that my situation right now isn’t too terrible. It’s just that once I get a bachelor’s degree, there is basically no going back. Let’s say I want to go to a good grad school to get into a completely different career field, I am concerned that my options will become very limited. I guess I could say that I am looking for a more fresh start. However, I do not know if it would even be considered a fresh start since I already have my associates. However, since I just have an associate degree, it doesn’t feel like a huge risk either, and I’ll probably also gain a better perspective. I am curious to know what are the pros and cons of maybe taking a gap year. If I do go down that path what can I do to make sure that I’m setting myself up for success. Also I looked into operations research and it seems very interesting especially for the field I want to go into. From my knowledge my current uni doesn’t have the exact major but it has similar courses!
When I was getting my master’s degree, I think that most of the students in the same program had gotten their bachelor’s degree in either mathematics or computer science. My bachelor’s degree was in mathematics but I also had taken a number of computer science classes.
For graduate admissions, what you do as an undergraduate student is going to matter more than where you do it. High grades will matter. Learning the material well will matter (and of course is highly correlated with high grades). Good coop or work experience will matter. References will matter. Getting good references again will be highly correlated with doing well in both your course work and your coops / internships / work experience.
There isn’t enough time for all of us to excel in everything. We choose what we are interested in and see how it goes.
One thing about majoring in math is that it is useful in a wide range of fields. As one example, one student I had known as an undergraduate I happened to run into years later. With a bachelor’s degree in math he had gone into acoustics. He showed me what he did on a day to day basis. Apparently there is a lot of math in making your car quiet or making every seat in a theater have good sound quality. Math of course is also useful in finance, computer science, and multiple other fields. A few years ago I had a tour of a radio telescope and again found that there is a lot of math in analyzing the data that they collect. Another person I used to know got a bachelor’s degree in math and then went to law school.
I am under the impression that a business degree is similarly applicable in multiple areas, although this is something that I do not know as well.
In terms of taking a gap year (or two or three) I think that how useful it is will depend upon what you do during that gap. I personally took a gap after getting my bachelor’s degree and before applying to graduate programs. I think that what I did during that gap was quite important in terms of both my deciding what I wanted to study in graduate school, and getting accepted to a good graduate program. My wife and both daughters similarly had some work experience after getting their bachelor’s degree and before applying to graduate programs. They all have said that this helped them pick an appropriate graduate program. For all of us our gaps were longer than one year but that is okay, life is not a race.
In your situation I think that you should seriously consider finishing your bachelor’s degree where you are, while taking courses that interest you quite likely including some business, finance, and math courses. Then work for a couple of years and see how it goes.
You have great grades. You would do fine at Penn State or Pitt. They’re both well recruited schools for business.
This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. If you’d like to reply, please flag the thread for moderator attention.