Urgent: Is Davidson too hard?

Northamerican1357
Thu, 29 Oct 2020 14:10:54 +0000

It’s difficult to answer that in an unbiased way. Obviously yes. I’ve lived that, so don’t want to come as condescending. In other words, you don’t really need to be offering that opinion to me directly, but understand if you’re playing devil’s advocate. It is to some extent, and I’m glad I chose LACs for that reason and in the long run it will probably all be well in good. And that is the standard rebuttal and a just one. But in the 2020 economy, which I’ll assume you might not be too familiar with from the perspective of a recent grad, let alone one interested in finance or other hypercompetitive spaces, the disadvantage we incur from grading like that outweighs the benefit. You need to consider the size and location of Davidson, amongst other things, in asking yourself if grads will have an easy time justifying poor grades. I think we do get placed well in the long run and you will see plenty of alums get great jobs across the board, with some HBS acceptances being a potential crown jewel, depending on your worldview. But every year more grads place poorly. We have really subpar initial rankings. And I’m jaded right now as one of those folks, so maybe ask me in two or so months, and the school had nothing to do with COVID. But every year grads petition the school (even those with excellent jobs immediately) to adjust the de facto (and largely un-communicated policy to those inside or outside the school) to fix deflation for deflation’s sake, which is what it comes down to. Yes, I worked much, much harder for poorer grades than those at peer schools, but did that enrich my experience or did I learn enough from having to work that much harder to make up for what the kid at Haverford picked up alongside his/her shiny GPA badge? Probably not. I don’t look at resumes as a recruiter, but if the Davidson montra of an A is a B, which myself and others think is too generous, then it’s a major problem, as with the typical resume, you’d start to wonder if something is wrong at about 3.3, while at Davidson this is an impressive outcome in lots of majors. Think about the message you’re sending as a school if you systematically lower the GPA. Do Davidson students have some internal error that causes them to underperform across the board relative to their peers at similar schools? No. We likely would have continued our positive growth trajectory that we had earned our entire lives up until that point. And this is what recruiters expect, rightfully so. This is what high schools expect when accepting kids from middle school and so forth. So unless the recruiter truly, truly knows the school, and even then, you’re up against it. If the school’s point is to teach some kind of lesson to us, that part is working.

I’m hoping over time the extra work there pays off, which it well could, and I’m proud of being able to do it and definitely got some sense of fulfillment- though the grades didn’t help. The principle is important. And the network is great to your point. But if you’re thinking about college more unsentimentally and frankly, smartly, who knows. If you yourself are paying for a large portion of it, this is a must-consider issue. You don’t want to have to rely on others goodwill to get a job that you deserve and are qualified for.