[tostitos1979]

Did you have a low GPA by any chance? In academia, this is considered a black mark :(

Honestly, I think you dodged a bullet. Academia isn't that magical (CS PhD here). I think you get a better education reading Hacker News some days.

[banachtarski]

Perhaps this was the case. I did not do well the first two years. I hated school in fact and averaged a 3.3 or so (the engineering courses felt very soft and uninteresting). This changed when I discovered pure math and theoretical physics and I averaged almost a 4.0 for the last two years with the most difficult courses so I didn't think it would matter. I like engineering now, but I wished that the fundamentals were covered more rigorously as the lack of rigor made me initially very disinterested.