General Advice

Starting a PhD is a major undertaking: one is signing up to thinking about a topic for many consecutive years, and being guided in their journey towards becoming an independent scientific thinker by a specific supervisor.

Picking a good supervisor

Of course it’s very important to pick a research area you’re passionate about. But having a productive PhD experience often comes down to a strong supervisor-student relationship. Here is a nice summary article: Ten simple rules for choosing a PhD supervisor.

It’s important to:

  • personally respect the research content and style of your supervisor: read their papers and other outputs they’ve produced.
  • be aligned in motivation—do the types of problems that excite your supervisor also excite you?
  • work productively and feel supported through your PhD candidature: if possible, do a short research project with the potential supervisor to get a feel for the relationship.
  • talk to the supervisor’s past and current students to try to get an open and frank understanding of what being their student is like. For example, our group has contact information for all past students.

All supervisors have positives and negatives. Once you have a clear picture of what the positives and negatives of your potential supervisor are, make the judgement about whether that combination will suit your style and what you hope to get out of your PhD.

A good supervisor will dedicate themselves to training their students to be the best scientists and humans that they can be. Their goals should be aligned with the students best interests, rather than their own. It’s a good sign if your potential supervisor listens to the student and their goals and aspirations, and helps plan a research path that is best for the student (a bad sign if the supervisor doesn’t mention alternatives to their research or apply pressure to work with them).

Getting through a PhD

A major reason why PhDs are difficult is that the skills that make a successful researcher are quite different to what make a good undergraduate student. For example:

  • A PhD is about building independence research skills that train you into being someone that others can trust for reliable, thoughtful, and carefully considered information.
    • You can see the University of Sydney’s list of PhD qualities here.
  • In this pursuit, speed is far less important than accuracy: it’s much better to think slowly and carefully than to be wrong.
  • It can be a terrifying transition to be primarily responsible for what you produce. Luckily you will have a supervisor and research team to support you, you have three years of practice, and with the right support, can bring a deeper depth of understanding and confidence.

Here is some useful material on the challenges of research life:

Doing a PhD with me at Sydney Uni

General information about doing a PhD at The University of Sydney is here and the application process for graduate research is described here. The fundamental requirement to be admitted to a PhD is an academic qualification that included a significant research component. Winning a PhD scholarship is very competitive, especially for international students. Options are summarized here. If you’re unsure about your competitiveness, feel free to contact me and I can help you to navigate the application process.

I have funding available to provide additional support to talented PhD students who are able to obtain competitive scholarship funding.

Funding for Local (Australian) PhD Students

You should apply for a Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship, or a University of Sydney Postgraduate Award (UPA).

Funding for International PhD Students

International Scholarships for Australia (Research Training Program or University of Sydney International Scholarship) are especially competitive. High marks are a prerequisite for obtaining PhD funding; only applicants with a weighted average mean in excess of 80 (corresponding to a first-class honours) are considered, and typically the threshold is far, far higher than this minimum. As well as high marks, students typically require some research experience (such as a published paper), and students from highly-ranked institutions can also have an advantage.

Some details of the criteria used are here. Some additional examples of funding sources for postgraduate research study are here. Australia Awards are available for students from countries with which Australia has a bilateral aid program: list of countries. There is also PhD funding for Chinese nationals.

General funding sources

  • An IBM PhD fellowship on high-throughput time-series analysis and machine learning.
  • A full list of research scholarship funding for Sydney University is here.

Preparing your application

Details for admission into a PhD program at Sydney University are [here]https://sydney.edu.au/courses/courses/pr/doctor-of-philosophy-science.html). Your PhD application will need to include a research proposal, which I will help you write around a specific research project, as well as two academic references.

After a PhD

It’s useful to think about what types of futures your present might lead to. Some PhD graduates will pick a research career.