Less than 3.0 GPA, is there a thread? Or hope?

Kajon
Tue, 01 May 2012 19:18:07 +0000

NPRmom - I have a mini success story to tell you! S1 applied the minimum amount of effort in high school and ended with a 2.74 His reading and comp is not strong and ACT score was 21. He thought life revolved around hockey and baseball. Fortunately, his self esteem is through the roof. In order to keep him interested we needed to find a 4 year college that while lower tiered had a good enough reputation so S1 could feel proud of his school. We also wanted to work in his criteria. Hockey, lakeshore campus and a newer business major buildings. He applied to 3 small LAC’s (Carthage College (WISC), Simpson (Iowa) and Susquehanna ¶ and the U of Wyoming and was accepted to 3 of the 4.

He chose Carthage www.carthage.edu and has been impressing us ever since. He is just finishing up his soph year and his GPA is above 3.5, he is captain of his club hockey team, enjoying his investing club, was offered an opportunity to spend 2 weeks at the Chicago Board of Option and has 2 great offers for summer internships with F500 companies.

Something clicked and he really wants to succeed. it has been fun to watch him learn that similar to sports, success in academics will come with hard work. He knows getting in to a solid MBA program will be tough so he is really working on his grades to offset the fact that his school is lower tiered and his ACT score was in the tank. He forgot his Ipad at home over break and while I was playing with it, I noticed he had downloaded a program to improve reading comprehension…

We are proud and better yet, he is proud.

I asked him what he would do differently in high school. His response…“I guess it really wouldn’t have taken much effort to go up a full letter grade in most of my classes…I should’ve done that”

S1 had a friend spend 1 1/2 years at a local CC and transferred to DePaul and another transferring to Southern Methodist this fall.