The Importance of Being Grades

I read Julianne's discussion of what a graduate admissions committee does not want to see. I thought a couple of the entries a bit funny:

• Transcripts with three times the number of courses (and substantially better grades) in music than in physics.
  
• "Stu Dent has excellent physical intuition and will undoubtedly succeed in graduate school". Except, Stu has mostly B's and C's in their physics courses and a 15th percentile on the physics GRE.
  

because, with some simple modifications, both probably apply to me (I took a bunch of music classes, but not "three times" as many, I got mostly Bs in physics and no Cs, and I did much better than 15th percentile). Perhaps needless to say, but I don't think undergraduate grades are particularly indicative of much.

So I was happy to see Arjendu discuss the issue from a different perspective.

As for my story, in high school I somehow felt than the only challenge was to get straight As without doing any work. Having succeeded at that, I somehow never recovered in college. I didn't work very hard but of course didn't get all As. So my graduate application was just good enough to get into a good school.

I should note also that I am probably the only physics major of my class who applied to graduate schools in physics who remains in any type of physics career.