Has anyone here screwed up their undergrad and graduated with a GPA around 2.5?

if i were you, i would go and work for a few years before applying to a masters program. maybe the work experience will be more of a factor for the criteria than your undergrad grades.

Screwed around the first two years, kicked ass the next two, graduated with two majors and four minors…2.9gpa.
Came out into the job mrkt during the 90 recession and decided to give myself a job!
Have started and ran four totally unrelated businesses, sucessfully since.
Don’t look back! What’s done is done, it can only hurt you if you’ve not learned from it.
Know that you CAN succeed at whatever you put your mind to…
Best of luck!
I second @malthauser ‘s response, get some experience under your belt (in your chosen field of study), it’ll carry a lot weight then a ‘BS’ degree.

Yeah, I graduated with a 2.9, which hurt in some jobs where they wanted to see a stellar academic record for jobs I knew I could do. They automatically assumed that I was either too dumb or too lazy to do the job. That’s not always the case, but it stung to see how my past mistakes caught up with me.

I would contact a counselor in the office of a B-school you might like to attend one day and ask what the best way would be to mitigate a poor undergrad showing. And when you do eventually apply, put in your essay how you’ve learned to do better and to apply yourself more from having learned from the outcome of your poor cumulative GPA as an undergrad, so you’ve done taken more initiative on your job. Admissions committees look for improvement over the course of the time in between. They’re aware that everyone isn’t some academic rock star, or hardly anyone would qualify for these places.

I graduated with a 2.5 in 1980, and have been steadily employed without a masters degree ever since.

Retaking important courses in which you did poorly and doing much better shows a commitment to improve on your early underperformance. Some universities will even replace your bad grade with your improved grade.

I graduated with honors, and almost never has anyone actually wanted to see what grades I had in college. I have also been paid very well in professions that had almost nothing to do with my degree… except it was an undergraduate liberal arts degree, so it taught me how to learn things, as well as other generally useful abilities.