Knight Hennessy, CS
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CS student here, planning on applying to Knight-Hennessy. Need some honest advice.
I'm pretty confident in the overall strength of my application... except for one thing that feels like it'll sink it before anyone even reads the rest.
My undergraduate GPA is 2.966.
The reason is that during my senior year I started working as an AI engineer. I interned with a company, they offered me a part-time position, and given the current job market, I took it. Looking back, that definitely hurt my grades.
The thing is, I spent most of my time building things instead of studying for exams.
In my third year, I was volunteering full-time with a well-known organization teaching machine learning and deep learning. I eventually took on a leadership role, organized hackathons, and even gave a lecture during a winter training program that my university requested from our organization.
The same year I graduated, I also published an IEEE paper.
Any course that involved projects, presentations, or discussions with professors/TAs, I usually did extremely well. My project grades were consistently high because that's where I put my effort. But when finals came around... I honestly just didn't study nearly as much as I should have. At the time, I genuinely believed (and still mostly do) that grades don't define your abilities and that employers care far more about experience and real projects.
Now I'm realizing that graduate admissions are a completely different story.
My question is: Would Stanford's CS department or Knight-Hennessy reject me purely because of my GPA before anyone even looks at the rest of my application? Do they have some sort of GPA cutoff or automatic filter?
The application fees are really expensive from where I live, so I'd rather know if I'm essentially throwing away money before I apply.
Someone suggested that I wait a year, complete a graduate diploma or pre-master's program in my home country, get excellent grades there, and then apply. The idea is that it would show I've academically matured and prove that my undergraduate GPA isn't representative of my ability.
Does that sound like the better route?
Also, if anyone has been in a similar situation, or knows of other fully funded Master's scholarships in computer science besides Stanford/Knight-Hennessy, I'd really appreciate any recommendations.
Thanks in advance. I'm open to any advice, even if it's tough to hear.