Hello All,
I’m currently deciding between Northeastern Honors College and Duke, and I’m curious as to what prospects Duke offers as far as graduate school is concerned. I know that if I were to do well at Northeastern GPA-wise I would have good prospects for a selective graduate school, and I was wondering how well I would need to do GPA-wise at Duke to be able to attend a graduate school of Duke’s stature or higher. For the record, I am an engineering student, which I would imagine has a large bearing on how well one would be required to do.
The best graduate and professional schools, just like their undergraduate counterparts, KNOW their primary “feeder institutions” very well. For this reason, GPA per se is not a decisive entrance-metric (although, it obviously is important). Standardized test results, recommendations from known and respected academic colleagues, curricular rigor, research experiences and interests, etc, are also critical. Duke places MANY young graduates in the world’s best postgraduate programs (including the top professional schools), which certainly demonstrates that a Pratt or Trinity Bachelor’s (with the concomitant, typically-Duke GPA) is well more than adequate to matriculate in ANY postgraduate program.
So, this is a very personal question to answer, as your grad school acceptance will depend alot on how YOU do in items such as Standardized testing, GPA, your compelling essay as to why you want to do xx at yy grad school, recommendations, etc.
So, like if you are looking at Law School - LSAT reigns supreme, followed by GPA. Med school… MCAT and GPA etc.
I will say that from this years’ graduating class (we know several students currently at Duke now)-- the engineering majors have a plethora of options… ranging from MIT, Stanford, Duke to consulting firms to companies like Google, Apple etc.
Duke is extremely well known for academic rigor so getting from there to anywhere (provided you personally do well) will not be a problem and yes, people do understand that given the rigor of engineering in particular, the GPA is not sole deterministic factor (you still need to be in the ballpark though).