The Unofficial SMART Scholarship Forum

Sir, you are an inspiration to people such as myself. I'm 41 and I was wondering if it was worth applying. Similarly, my undergrad GPA was 3.27 twenty years ago. My Masters and PHD are 4.0 over the last five years. Therefore, my overall GPA was 3.5. Based on the competitive nature of this program and my age I wondered the same thing. I hope you did the right thing and applied. I finally did...

I am 57 working on my PhD in CS and I applied. I figure they will either love me or hate me.

as another old person once said: "do, or do not. there is no try". copy and paste your post into the application, that would be a good start.

After reading all these posts, I wonder if I should even apply! First, I will be 60 years old when I start my Ph.D program next fall. Second, my GPA is less than stellar - mostly due to a bad start 40 years ago. Since returning to university and completing my B.S, I have earned a 3.78 with the overall rising to 3.21. My GRE scores are good (I think) with my Verbal being high (650) and my Quantitative being a little low for a Computer Science Major (740). My strengths are an excellent resume with over 40 years experience, culminating in my current position as an Enterprise Architect. Although I have no 'real' research experience, I have accomplished many things that are not in the normal scope of duties such as developing computer to computer communications while in the military, developing a 3270 emulation program, developing a DEC dibol to Micro Focus Cobol cross compiler as well as designing a cell level data security scheme for a large data warehouse. I was on active duty in Vietnam and received a Navy Acheivement medal for the computer to computer work as well as a couple of other citations. Within the last couple of years, I have presented at several conferences. I plan on getting my Ph.D. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) with a certificate in Cognitive Science. So, will my age automatically bounce me? Should I continue the process?