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Vague question, I know. But allow me to explain it.

I'm a second-year undergrad student in Physics. I entered in the pandemics, and, due to laziness and some personal issues, up to this point, I don't have a stellar record. Not any actual failures or anything of the kind (although I might have one this semester), but, overall, it's a mediocre record. Didn't do homeworks, for example, and that was what gave a hit on my grades.

I still have a lot of more advanced courses to take, obviously, but, realizing my situation, I'm not that excited. My question is: Given that, can I turn my school record around? Obviously, I don't mean excluding anything (it wouldn't be called a record then), but, really, turning it around. Meaning, when I try to enter grad school, and they see not so great results in those opening stages, but, in the deeper levels, overall good records, how would that possibly be taken?

I just turned 20, so it does feel ridiculous to ask if it's too late for anything, but academia is a whole different world.

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

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  • Find yourself the deep reason why you found the homework not interesting. Too hard? too abstract? too much analytical calculations? too much programming? who cares about parity of eigenvectors? Laziness is a consequence (and blaming laziness is a lazy explanation :D ), not a cause of that.
    – EarlGrey
    Commented Jul 6, 2022 at 13:39
  • Too speculative for an answer, but I suspect many admission committees will give more weight to your later grades than to the earlier ones. Many students have trouble "getting started" in college.
    – Bob Brown
    Commented Jul 6, 2022 at 15:15
  • Anecdotally, I hovered dangerously around a 3.0 for the first two years of undergrad and yanked it back up to a 3.3 by graduation. It wasn't easy though, especially since I took many more credit hours during the first two years.
    – ribs2spare
    Commented Jul 6, 2022 at 16:25
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    It may help to better define what you mean by "turn it around." I assume you mean "if I improve my grades starting now, can I still get into grad school," in which case you should see our canonical question about grad school admissions for weak and borderline students
    – cag51 ♦
    Commented Jul 6, 2022 at 17:01
  • @EarlGrey I can't tell you with pure certainty. What I can say is, I didn't like how the things were structured, in the basic levels, that being, Calc.(I-III), some of the introductory courses in physics. It is so mechanical, I never felt like learning anything with doing exercises besides the ability to do more exercises. I did well enough on those, I never failed a test, but I was very discouraged to do the assignments, or study even.
    – Johann Wagner
    Commented Jul 7, 2022 at 0:04

2 Answers 2

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Without knowing just how mediocre you mean, it is not possible to answer very well. But I do know people with 2.7-8/4 GPA (and 4-5 publications as undergrad) who managed to secure a graduate position at a top 10 US University. So, in theory an absolutely gargantuan yes!

But most likely, waiting for that one day to come when you will get your life together and work hard is still being tied to the chains of youthful idealism. Shift your work habits, I think it's possible.

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Internships, summer placements at a research laboratory and involvement with applied research are the things that can counterweight your "low" grades.

These activities will be helpful in two ways:

  1. they provide you a contact network (simply getting in touch with more people, active groups in the research world are always on the look-out for fresh forces)
  2. they show your motivation to work in a certain field (yes, it is an important consideration).

The grades show what you achieved, your potential may be higher, who knows, and who cares: please note that contrary to the general feeling in the Physics world, the world is not divided between uneducated barbarians and potential Nobel prizes, there are a lot of top-notch head of research groups who would not get a Nobel prize in a thousand years.

If you try hard in the next semesters to look for internships&similar things and you do not manage any, well, it may be an independent assessment that you are not cut for the abstraction required in physics. This leaves the door open for you to get your feet wet in the thousands of applied fields that require a good understanding of physics (irrespective of your definition of "Physics I enjoy" you mean Newton's second law, Partial differential equation, thermodynamics, rational mechanics, etc ... don't worry, there is a niche waiting for you if you survived the bachelor exams without much commitment).

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