Why freshman GPA is ridiculously important

Networking and connections are what really matters. GPA in general are important, but I wouldn't consider life being over because you don't have a 3.9 after your 1st year in college.

I am surprised baldness isn't on the rise with the level of stress kids nowaday have. Do well in school, meet people, help others and you will be fine. The kid with a 3.9 gpa tweaking out over everything isn't going to go over well.

Stop scaring these kids. I never had a finance related internship (had a 3.6 at a target), and actually did something cool by living and working in a 3rd world country my junior year. I worked in banking for 3 years at MM shop and currently work on the buyside at a well respected PE fund. Enjoy your youth while doing something interesting and worthwhile. Tools like this guy are a dime a dozen. Differentiate yourself.

i agree, im just making a remark and i didnt even have a freshman internship, just my 2 cents on how b-schools and PE double count/triple count GPA

I think any person who sees a freshman/sophmore with worthwhile internship will attribute it to that persons connections rather than GPA

i agree.

Take it from someone who has gone through OCR recruiting that GPA is only important if its under 3.4/3.5. Of course it's not smart to aim for that. Aim for a 4.0 and you'll have a 80% chance of ending up with a 3.5 or higher.

im not saying GPA itself is very important, but that it is counted multiple times (since experience is more important but they are based on GPA) for FT PE and Bschool applications

I would have to say that networking is just as important as your GPA freshman year, a software developer of a PE group isn't goingto not get the job because he had a c in freshman english, what matters most academically, besides where you attend and their career resources, is the transcript because your transcript shows your performance in classes that are the most relevant for the internship you are applying for. Just my two cents.

i think you are missing my point, im not saying the GPA is directly important, just that it leads to one experience, which leads to another, and it all snowballs so each recruiting process double includes GPA as a factor and experience which was based on GPA

Plenty of people get internships without having one after freshman year, as long as you don't get like a 0.5 GPA your freshman year it doesn't really matter that much...

SAT is most important because for MBA recruiting it's counted 9 times! Do the math.

C'mon, man. With all due respect, this thread is retarded.

I didn't even have a GPA and still got a BB internship this year as a freshman. Though I have a 3.7 now.

My roommate had a 3.4 gpa his freshman year. This year he got FT offers from MS IBD, GS IBD, and Lazard.

GPA matters of course, but it's not "ridiculously" important.

dude you need to chill out - i didn't even know what banking was when i was a freshmen and i taught middle school kids that summer, my GPA was 3.2 or something like that. I have to say that luck struck my way when time came for me to break into banking (and obviously i tried hard), just do the best you can while have fun in college, you don't even understand how much you would miss college after you enter the workforce

Seriously...if you spend the entire first year of college working towards getting a great GPA so you can work in an industry you, in all likelihood, don't even know for sure that you wanna work in you've wasted what could've been the best year of your life.

IMO, HS internships is the most important because it lead to freshman summer which lead to soph summer, etc.

IMO, who your parents are is the most important, because it determines how smart and good-looking you are, which determines what your SAT score is and how much you got laid in HS, which, of course, inevitably determines whether you get GS TMT or MS M&A. God forbid such a travesty.

That's retarded logic - don't make yourself look like a tool

I had a 2.7 GPA freshmen year - i graduated with a 3.5