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I am a Computer Engineering major at a top 15 engineering school. My goal is to get into grad school for Machine Learning. I have set very lofty goals and am aiming for places like MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, CMU etc. I will be applying for safeties too but these top tier colleges remain the goal.

I have got a 3.8 in college till now. The issue is that I am messing up a lot in my electrical circuits analysis course. I am in the C to D range in the course. The professor is extremely harsh while grading and covers grad school material in an intro course. I am thinking of withdrawing from the course. I am confident that I can perform well next semester when I take it under different circumstances. Seeing as circuits aren't related to machine learning or computer science, I was wondering how bad would a W for this course look in my transcript, while having an otherwise great record.

I am also involved in research involving machine learning and will be doing so till the end of undergrad. It's this one thing which is worrying.

It is, of course, impossible to say how someone will look at it, but I doubt that very many people would think it odd or unusual. It is pretty easy for students to get in too deep with studies and the other things during undergraduate years. If you drop now and do well later few would think less of you, I predict.

But if you make a habit of it, then things might be different.

Since it is difficult to predict the time requirements for research, you have a ready-made explanation for getting in over your head for a term.

However, a poor grade, such as a D in a major course would be cause for concern. Not necessarily disqualifying but it needs explanation.

I have some personal experience with this matter. Every semester during my undergrad, I enrolled in well beyond a full course load with math and computer science courses outside my major (biology). I was trying to break into bioinformatics from a state school without a bioinformatics program. I put classwork on the backburner to more thoroughly invest in my research and ultimately withdrew from a biochemistry course. I graduated summa cum laude with departmental honors for research and a 3.65 GPA. My goal was not as lofty as yours. l simply wanted to gain entrance to a PhD program in bioinformatics. I am currently a second year PhD student with a W on my undergraduate transcript. I think that demonstrating consistent commitment to research is of greater value than a pristine GPA and minimal introduction to graduate level reseach. I cannot say whether programs at more prestigious universities value one area of student success more than another or if success across all endeavors is expected. But there are graudate programs that accept students with Ws and research narrative that overshadows the minor transcript blemish

If you withdraw from a course during an otherwise "normal" semester, most people judging your transcript from the perspective of graduate school admissions will assume that you were not doing well in the course. If you later complete the course with a good grade (A or B), this won't matter much. It also won't matter much if the course content is not particularly important for your Ph.D. field. To be honest, it will not hurt your application terribly if you get one or two bad grades in courses that are not particularly important for your Ph.D. field as long as your overall GPA is not impacted too much.

What would be more troubling to me would be to see a student receiving a poor grade in a course even though they withdrew from the course on an earlier attempt or attempts, withdrawing from the same course multiple times, or withdrawing from multiple courses over your program.