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I graduated with a 6.4/10 GPA from a Non-IIT University in India - BE in CS in 2019. I pretty much messed up during my early 2 years of UG while taking part in non-academics such as workshops and research. Only later I have realized that it was too late to improve and now I am facing the consequences of neglecting good grades. I wasn't a lazy student, I worked 16 hours a day learning something new for research, solving math and leetcoding because I couldn't stand the classroom environment.

I hate blaming the University but they were rather a scam ridden cash cow run by unprofessional people and did not encourage any sort of research activities or any funding for it. Luckily, my time in research did not require much funding yet I have managed to publish 12 papers during my 5 years (9 during undergrad) at well reputed domestic and international conferences - IEEE, Springer, etc, 3 winning awards. I frankly enjoyed the lab work and research part of my UG because it gave me complete freedom to explore my skills and work, yet it's frustrating how marks is always given the first preference. I have graduated with most publications compared to anyone who have studied in my University. I feel really cheated as I was told publications were preferred over GPA.

I was an aspiring MS and PhD candidate for Natural Language Processing. And now I'm seeing that I have been rejected by ASU and I'm pretty sure it was because of my GPA, which probably never made it to the AdCom. This is my first post on stack exchange and I really want to know whether my career has hit a dead end here. I'm feeling tired and frustrated, thinking about a career change since a second chance elsewhere to prove my worth would at least take me beyond a bachelors degree.

Volko
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    For context, what is ASU. Worldwide it probably has several meanings. – Buffy Jan 01 '21 at 15:59
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    The publication obsession is certainly a lie, if your gpa isn't 3.2+ you might as well not bother. Frankly that it's from India makes it even worse from a US perspective. – FourierFlux Jan 01 '21 at 16:27
  • The most important determining factor in graduate admissions is neither GPA nor the number of publications, but rather letters of recommendation from well-known established researchers in the field that attest to your research potential. Depending on where you are in India (you say you didn't go to IIT so this is a possibility), the professors you have access to through your research might not have enough name recognition for their letters to contain meaningful information. [cont.] – Mike 691 Jan 01 '21 at 20:46
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    However, as FourierFlux mentioned, Americans generally seem to agree that grades from Indian universities carry some useful information, maybe because there is less grade inflation than in the USA. So in this sense, a high GPA was perhaps one of the best chances you had to get noticed. As for the publications, you haven't told us how many other authors they had, who those coauthors were, and whether you had letters of recommendation that talked about them. – Mike 691 Jan 01 '21 at 20:49
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    The statement that research is the primary purpose of graduate school is wrong, all have a minimum course requirement with a certain GPA requirement. No research but high gpa will usually give admission but maybe unfunded. Poor gpa gets you nothing. – FourierFlux Jan 01 '21 at 21:01

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