<p>I’m not sure if this will assuage your fears or make you stress out further but this is my experience. Please note that we really don’t compare grades @ HC but, when you’ve gone to enough graduations, you can get a sense as to what people can accomplish with certain GPA’s… and close friends will talk in the privacy of closed dorm rooms. *** What you get after HC ALSO depends on other factors such as great summer internships and extracurriculars. *** In terms of summa and magna cum laude, it’s more GPA percentiles than cut offs, but here you go…</p>
<h2>Only 1 person graduated from my class Summa which is a GPA between 3.9-4.0. This person doubled majored in Astronomy and Physics and won a prestigious Navy fellowship to study Astro-Physics at THEE top university for this field. I’m sure he’ll win the Nobel one of these days… and this person is modest and nice, too.</h2>
<p>And everyone else who are more similar than different…</p>
<p>Magna is roughly 3.7-3.9. My friends in the class before me, my class and the class after me who wound up going to HMS (Harvard) or Hopkins were Magna (normally 2-3 per class go to HMS or Hopkins). My friend and lab partner, who was accepted into HMS, Hopkins and UCSF as an out of stater decided on HMS. After she made her decision, the Dean of Admissions from Hopkins actually called her up one morning to ask what he could do differently to attract someone like her to Hopkins (she only told me and her boyfriend this). Of course, she had a lot more than just a nice GPA… Basically, don’t feel bad if you’re not magna @ HC cause 99.9% of people on earth are not stratospheric like this. </p>
<p>For the next group (GPA 3.6-3.7 or so), the next “distinction” are likely departmental honors (no cum laude @ HC) and we wound up at med schools like Yale MD/PhD, Columbia, Penn, Mount Sinai, Duke MD/PhD… U Chicago, Columbia and Stanford Law, or got great job offers…</p>