People used to take one look at me and think, "that guy is a nerd, he must be a straight A student." They were half right; although I never really liked the term nerd. I struggled with my grades since the 7th grade. But my opinion of the GPA system changed drastically in 2011.
In 2011 I had the opportunity to go to a career fair. By this point I had already designed, built and programmed a lot of really cool projects. Including my first video game system called JConsole, as well as a number of multisensors and an RC car with a simple see and avoid algorithm. I had also developed my own large number datatype in C++. I documented each project carefully, placing pictures and information on the back of my resume. I also had a binder that contained over 8000 lines of code that I had written for numerous projects. I wore my suit and tie to the career fair, trying to be as impressive as possible. This was just after my internship where I had researched and contributed to a paper on integrated circuit bond pads. This was the very height of my academic career and I had spent time on class projects as well as personal projects. Most companies at the career fair readily accepted my "me in 2 minutes" and took a copy of my resume. But one company took a look at my resume and said "Where's your GPA?" I said "Who cares, if you just take a look at all the..." The recruiter cut me off mid-sentence "We won't take your resume unless you have a 3.6 or higher." They wouldn't even look at it. They couldn't see past their GPA standard. That one number was more important to them than any of my accomplishments or extracurricular work. Of course now I have had a highly successful career as a software engineer, I was even successful in my first job as a firmware engineer. In my spare time I constantly work to improve my knowledge and skills and develop new technologies. What I have discovered though is that the GPA standard for employment isn't an accurate standard. Most companies that use it claim they have no other way to measure how good of an employee a student will make. That's a pretty lazy answer, basically they have so many applications they aren't interested in actual talent; they just want to screen out people so they have less work to do. They are missing out on good talent by using methods like that. There are probably other things they could look at, personal projects, papers, how students worked in other jobs. There's a lot of data that can be an indicator about how good someone will be at the job, relaying on a single data point as a gatekeeper is, as I have stated; a very lazy approach to hiring.
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