[Anonymous]

First off, thank you all for the advice on my previous topic. 🙂 I have decided to go through recruiting again in the fall, and hopefully it doesn’t go too badly.

Now, recently I’ve had to revise/update my resume in accordance to my program’s 5th-year student guidelines (the way my program goes, we recruit as 3rd-year students, do our internships in the spring of the 4th year, and then contingent on receiving full-time offers decide whether to accept/decline the offer, and if we decline the offer we recruit again in the 5th year, which is what I am doing). I found out that as 5th-year students, we are required to separate our undergrad/grad GPAs, and within that, our major/cumulative GPAs.

When I first recruited with the Big 4 as a 3rd-year student, my cumulative GPA was around a 3.7 and my major GPA was around a 3.66, and my resume was accepted and I was called to interview (me botching the interviews because I had no prior work experience and no idea what I was doing is another story). As a 5th-year student now, my cumulative GPA is still above a 3.5, but my cumulative undergrad GPA is a 3.33 and my undergrad major GPA is a 3.0. This is due to the fact that I’ve only taken two graduate courses (one accounting, and one non-accounting), and I had a tough time with the one accounting course, which resulted in me receiving a B in it. Please also note that only about 30% of students receive scores in the A/A- range, about 50% receive scores in the B-range, and about 20% receive scores in the C/D/F range (thus, I think I am statistically average).

Nonetheless, I am quite worried about having a significantly lower current graduate GPA (even if it’s only due to one difficult class). Will having a 3.0 graduate major GPA on my resume completely count me out of the Big 4’s books? Please note that I’ve also since completed a tax-season internship with a Top 6 public accounting firm (which I received a full-time offer with but declined), so I hope having that experience on my resume will at least somewhat make up for my lower GPA.

Does anyone have any advice on what to do in a situation like this/how to explain myself to recruiters (I will be attending a few recruiting events in several weeks in order to get started on networking again)? Or am I irrevocably doomed?