It usually starts in April of third year, barely noticeable at first, but getting stronger as the days pass. By the time March of fourth year rolls around, there’s no escaping it. It becomes a gnawing worry that escalates into panic, the hours spent tossing and turning at night, wondering, fretting, obsessing: What am I going to do after I graduate?
If you haven’t heard any confirmation of your brilliance from Oxford’s grad school yet, you’ll probably be lying on the kitchen floor with a copy of Training Today’s Youth to Succeed from your guidance counselor, thinking about employment. After four years of essays and exams, finding a job should be easy, right? You happily see yourself shaking an employer’s hand, when suddenly he asks for something horrible, his lips curling around the words—“YOUR TRANSCRIPT.”
But does this institutionally-hyped parchment, which bears our graded intelligence, matter at all to employers?
“In third year I started to worry that my grades were going to affect my job prospects,” says Carrie Cartmill, who graduated from U of T last June with a degree in human biology and biological anthropology. She now works full-time as a research assistant at a small consulting company. “There is so much emphasis put on grades in university that it’s easy to get caught up in the idea that grades are going to matter once you leave school. When I started looking for a job, most employers were interested in my computer skills and my past work experience. To get my current job I had to provide three references, go through a forty-five minute interview and do a computer skills test. Never was I asked about my grades.”
We know grades don’t necessarily reflect a student’s potential to perform in the working world. The ability to write fifteen pages about death imagery in early Renaissance poetry, or memorize the parts of the brain, doesn’t easily translate into employment success. Many employers, it seems, think the same way. For them, a university degree is just a very expensive license to work. Nothing more, nothing less. So relax. Graduation puts everyone on an equal footing, whether you had a 2.1 or a 4.0 GPA. There’s a good chance your transcripts will never see the light of day.
“Grades are not an accurate reflection of how they [new employees] would fit in at the office,” says David Nitkin, president and owner of EthicScan Canada, a small corporate ethics research and consulting firm. Mr. Nitkin regularly hires recent graduates. He doesn’t ask applicants for transcripts because he doesn’t consider grades to be a “meaningful indicator” of an employee’s potential. Instead, he asks them to provide three references and a writing sample, which he considers more telling in terms of potential job performance.
“Determine whether or not you need to worry,” says Yvonne Rodney, associate director of the career center. She stresses grades are important for students who want to go into a profession like law or accounting. In most cases there are more important things than grades, like personality and experience. Rodney confirms the majority of employers don’t ask for transcripts. “Worry less about grades, and more about developing the necessary skills [to be employed],” she says. Once you’ve decided what you want to do, you can start learning about what skills you need and how to use past work experience to your advantage. “Know what skills you have. Know what skills are relevant to that industry.” Rodney says the biggest challenge for most graduates is a “struggle to get across their relevant skills to employers.”
According to Rodney, employers are looking for “anyone who can hit the ground running”—grades or no grades. And if you don’t have a covering letter and resume that will make you stand out from hundreds of other applicants, even the highest GPA won’t help, she says.
Contacts can also be much more influential than grades in the job search. Paul Johnston is a U of T graduate who used a contact from a summer position to help him get full-time work as a sales representative at pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca two years ago. He was never asked about his grades during the application or interview process. “I didn’t get the job because of my marks,” he says. “I got it because I had the right kind of experience through summer work. My job was about people skills, not academics, and I was judged mostly on how I did during the interview.”
There are some employers out there who do look at marks, however. The Royal Bank Financial Group, for example, hires about 400 recent university graduates every year. Of those, approximately half have to turn in a copy of their transcripts. John Stockwell, manager of campus recruitment and community outreach at RBC, says he looks at a student’s academic career the same way he looks at past work experience, the main objective being to find out “how well the student did that job.” Stockwell says RBC also looks at summer and part-time work experience, as well as community and extra-curricular involvement. “Transcripts are just one of the pieces of the matrix used to evaluate student applications,” he says.
Remember: the matrix will be judging you.
