> Does anybody care about GPA after the first job?
If you're trying to get into medical school, that's not really a fair question. Your college GPA directly affects your med school prospects, which greatly affects your residency prospects, and in turn your lifetime career earnings. If you're getting B's in level 1 & 2 physics and chemistry, you're not getting into Harvard.
Ah, well yes. Any sort of grad/medical school is absolutely going to require you to to pay close attention to your GPA. I don't think most students are looking to go that route though; I certainly wasn't.
I wouldn't call missing those things "the end of the world" unless you are really dead set on that route.
Most undergrads have no idea where they will end up in life. I certainly could not have predicted the graduate programs I considered - none of them having anything to do with my EECS major.
Getting poor (or even average) grades closes many doors, especially in these days of grade inflation (at many, but not all schools).
This isn't necessarily true. I had a 2.9ish GPA as an undergrad history major but I still got into a respectable engineering masters program (NC State) based on career merits. Granted, that was 10 years after I entered the workforce as a technical professional, but even so, there are many ways to reach any given end state, via hard work, excellent communication skills, and [hopefully] a strong network.
With excellent communication skills, and hard work, AND a strong network, you could get very far anyway.
Matter of fact those are 3 skills that are always in demand because anyone who possesses them can avoid truly coming to grips with the question in this thread: The necessity of good grades in determining your career.
I don't think you can bundle medical sciences and something like math/physics/engineering. To be a good doctor you need a good amount of analytical skills and intuition built on experience. But the most important of all is really, you need to have a lot of memory storing capacity.
Bulk of medicine is how much you can remember. There is nothing like, let me work this out on a paper or fire up a REPL, in fact in their case- Something like putting a patient on pause while you refer a book is totally unacceptable. So remembering stuff all around.
I realized this pretty early and decided not to be a doctor. I just can't imagine my self memorizing things at such detail.
I was only responding to the "GPA matters for nobody after a few years" comment, by demonstrating that for a select subset of university students (pre-med) it's simply not true.
While true for the aggregate, there are always exceptions. I know someone who had a GPA <= 2.3 from a mediocre state school that went to medical school in the Caribbean.
The person did so well on Step 2 that s/he was invited to transfer back to the US at a fist tier medical school, and is now the director of cardiology at a prestigious hospital.
If you're trying to get into medical school, that's not really a fair question. Your college GPA directly affects your med school prospects, which greatly affects your residency prospects, and in turn your lifetime career earnings. If you're getting B's in level 1 & 2 physics and chemistry, you're not getting into Harvard.