How will messing up my first year in college (2003) affect getting into grad school?

juillet
Mon, 21 Oct 2013 16:49:41 +0000

Your advisor’s statement makes me wary that he knows what he’s talking about. In my field, “state schools” are some of the top-ranked schools - Michigan, UW-Madison and Minnesota are ranked right up there with Princeton, Yale, and Stanford, so an advisor telling a psychology student that they would get into a “state school at best” would be confusing indeed.

Besides, I would be hard-pressed to believe that a student with a 3.8, significant research experience, publications, relevant internships, etc. would be turned down from programs because of mistakes made over 10 years ago. Your performance when you were 18 has little to no bearing on your performance now that you are 28 or 29, and most people are going to assume that the way you will do in grad school will be more based upon how you performed in the last 4-5 years. They’re not going to completely ignore your most recent 4 years to focus on something that happened 10 years ago, not if they make any sense.