I had a couple of quick questions in terms about my transcript.
Due to some immigration issues, my fellowship to a 4-year university was revoked right before my freshman year, and since I wasn't able to afford it, I dropped out of school. I attended community college while I worked close to full-time hours to save money and later transferred to a four year degree. Though I worked close to the same hours during both stints, I was pretty frustrated by my situation so I didn't take community college very seriously at the beginning (There was a point where I thought of not even bothering with school). My grades definitely reflect this:
Community college (4 years, 87 units) - 3.43 GPA
State University (2 years, 76 units) - 3.80 GPA (*)
(*) I ended up in the dean's or the president's list every single full-time semester I was here. I also was super involved in school, and continued working same amount of hours while taking more and more units every single semester. Due to some of these factors, the faculty awarded me with "Most Outstanding Graduate" upon graduation.
To round out academics, I've taken the GMAT twice scoring first 660 and then 710.
My questions are the following:
1. Do I address my academic track-record in the application in an actual essay, or should I use the "optional" essay to tell what happened? Or should I just let the grades speak for themselves?
2. Since I have two transcripts, what cumulative GPA should I use? The four-year university didn't transfer all the units I took at community college and as a result I have two different GPA's. One that is on my four year degree university transcript, and the other one that is the addition of all the classes and grades I took at both institutions.
Due to some immigration issues, my fellowship to a 4-year university was revoked right before my freshman year, and since I wasn't able to afford it, I dropped out of school. I attended community college while I worked close to full-time hours to save money and later transferred to a four year degree. Though I worked close to the same hours during both stints, I was pretty frustrated by my situation so I didn't take community college very seriously at the beginning (There was a point where I thought of not even bothering with school). My grades definitely reflect this:
Community college (4 years, 87 units) - 3.43 GPA
State University (2 years, 76 units) - 3.80 GPA (*)
(*) I ended up in the dean's or the president's list every single full-time semester I was here. I also was super involved in school, and continued working same amount of hours while taking more and more units every single semester. Due to some of these factors, the faculty awarded me with "Most Outstanding Graduate" upon graduation.
To round out academics, I've taken the GMAT twice scoring first 660 and then 710.
My questions are the following:
1. Do I address my academic track-record in the application in an actual essay, or should I use the "optional" essay to tell what happened? Or should I just let the grades speak for themselves?
2. Since I have two transcripts, what cumulative GPA should I use? The four-year university didn't transfer all the units I took at community college and as a result I have two different GPA's. One that is on my four year degree university transcript, and the other one that is the addition of all the classes and grades I took at both institutions.
