tmck3053

Hi all - have been lurking for a bit but thought I'd introduce myself. I'm applying from Sydney, Australia, where I did my undergrad. I feel like a slightly non-standard applicant in that sense because we don't really do GPAs or anything like that in Australia so I had to leave much of that blank in the application. I did obviously have to sit the GRE (170/170/6.0) and my writing sample is sort of in social epistemology. My AOIs are vague I guess but they're mostly in phil of language, phil of maths, epistemology - mostly from a pragmatist perspective. I'm applying to some places that are nice to pragmatists (Chicago, Pittsburgh, Harvard, etc.) and some other places that are probably a bit more indifferent (Berkeley, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, NYU, MIT, Oxford). Anyway - that's me! Good luck everyone with your applications and also good luck in your various attempts to avoid intense blood pressure spikes every time you receive an email. My own efforts in that regard are not going so well.

A quick question - on all of the application portals, obviously they are very interested to know your undergraduate GPA. I've just completed my undergrad in Sydney, and in Australia we make no real use of GPAs at all and it certainly isn't shown on our transcript. We have a variety of mark bands but no official GPA calculation. Most of the applications I've gone through say that they don't want you to calculate your GPA for them but just enter what is on your transcript. As a result I've been leaving the GPA section blank and attaching my transcript as per usual. My question is - is this the best thing to do? Has anyone else found themselves in this situation? I feel slightly that I'm leaving my application bare or undersold, especially seeing as though I have (the equivalent of) a 4.0 in philosophy and feel like it would be worth stating this somehow. I've only really thought to ask advice for this now and I've submitted half of my applications, but if anyone has any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.