Training and Learning Bonus for Postgraduate Scholarship Holders

As part Australian Government’s Household Stimulus Package, postgraduate scholarship holders are now also eligible for a one off payment of $950. More information can be found through centerlink:
http://www.centrelink.gov.au/internet/internet.nsf/individuals/hsp_postgrad.htm

Since scholarships are tax free, many students missed out on the regular $900 package as no tax was paid during the 2007-2008 fiancial year. Hoorah PhD friends, you can now get $950 ($50 more than regular folk)! Only catch that's made some fellow PhD colleagues ineligible yet again is the $20,427 lower bound on other/non APA/non APAI/non NHMRC scholarships. The Melbourne University Scholarships Office is emailing/has emailed letters of proof to scholarship recipients.

As for me, I received my $900 a couple of weeks ago; I worked for 4 months at Google during the 2007-2008 financial year, bumping me into the range where I was eligible for the regular stimulus incentive. I don't think I can receive two packages. Although, it doesn't explicitly exclude me as I am quite sure I did not receive a Training and Learning Bonus or a Back to School Bonus payment. I tried calling centrelink but the English lines are constantly busy and it felt like I was put on hold indefinitely on the multilingual/Chinese language lines.

Melbourne University Postgraduate Scholarships (local students)

Most people who do postgraduate research degrees at the University of Melbourne are on scholarships. More information can be found here. There's links there to apply online for the coming year. Deadlines are usually 31st October the previous year. The time line for local students can be found here and the international one is not too difficult to locate. There's different yet similar ones for international students. This entry will mostly talk about local students.

Depending on how fantastic you are and general area of research and personal situations, there are many types of scholarships to apply for. Generally, the most common one is the APA - Australian Postgraduate Award. It's about $19 000 per annum. No guarantees but if you get over 85 average, you're in with a good chance. Over 90, better chance. Less than those, not so good. In missing out on those, there are MRS, the Melbourne Research Scholarships. These are slightly less than the APA but are also about $19 000 per annum. People around the 85 mark who missed out on the APA might get a MRS.

You apply for the MRS and APA at the same time online. They prefer you to apply for enrolment as well. Although I have heard of students who have received scholarship but hadn't applied for the degree yet. Obviously they can't have the money until they enrol. I think they prefer you/force you to do it so it's easier on the paperwork.

MRS and APA are university wide. In computer science, another main source of funding that I had experience with is NICTA. In my year and the years before it, NICTA were quite generous with their scholarships (plentiful). The amount is also about $19 000 (maybe slightly less) if you missed out on a APA or MRS and about a $8000 top up if you got an APA or an MRS. These work in conjunction with MRS/APA. Applications for NICTA scholarships are separate from what I remember. If you get an APA/MRS, they are happy to give you a top up because they get some IP rights (you sell your research soul as some of my friends say). If you don't get an APA/MRS, they will give you just the normal $19 000 for your research IP. But starting last year, new NICTA recipients must also take some coursework. Not a lot, just maybe 1 a semester for each semester of your degree. Also NICTA is generous (monetary) with travel stipends. They cover a lot.

They are the common ones. The other ones are more dependant on your supervisor/project area. There are departmental scholarships and also APAI ones if you are interested in a project that a supervisor happens to have the funding for. These are usually made by private arrangement between the student and the supervisor and project that both parties are interested in that has been allocated funding. It usually has more to do with the supervisor. There's industry based scholarships as well. There are many different ways to arrange these. With my industry scholarship, the company contacted my supervisor because he was an expert in the area they wanted research in. And I was a student who was particularly interested in that area so it was a fit. There's usually more money involved with APAI and industry scholarships, about $25 000 to $30 000 per annum. Industry ones usually don't sit well with NICTA. Because both want IP and don't like to share. So for me, I chose industry and let my NICTA go. Depending on your industry, they may also have some travel allowance as well.

Top ups: as I mentioned before with NICTA, they give you top ups if you have MRS/APA. CSIRO can also offer the same deal but once again, it's often very project/supervisor dependent. You usually have to have a collaborator at CSIRO who is interested. CSIRO also doesn't work well with NICTA or industry (IP again).

All research students are entitled to department and graduate school funding. I've written more information about these types of funding here and here.

All PhD scholarships are tax free. And tuition is not really an issue. There are certain number of government places for research students and everyone I've ever know to do a research degree has been given a placement. So the learning is for free and you have enough to live on.

Graduate School Funding

School of graduate studies have a Melbourne Abroad Travelling Scholarship. The give up to $1250. That would cover everything.

The main three criteria for the graduate school scholarships are as follows

• be a confirmed PhD student
  
• be travelling overseas and for at least 10 days
  
• entail at least two distinct purposes that are clearly relevant to the thesis
  

MAT supplies additional funding to students who wish to travel overseas for purposes related but not essential to the completion of a their PhD. Some general eligibility include never being granted a MAT before, being confirmed as a PhD student, having received funding but not sufficient funding from other sources as well and having more than one purpose for travel of at least 10 days. The student needs to get permission to study overseas/leave for the period as well. The scholarship is offered two rounds every year. Applications close 31st March and 31st August every year. The most difficult part of the application is writing your justification, working out your exact expenditure and getting all the relevant parties to sign off on everything. There's the justification for travel, approval from your supervisor, approval from head of department, analysis of travel risk forms and finally the permission to have research leave/overseas study and such. But it's not too tedious of a process if the addition funding can be granted. About 160 scholarships are offered every year so 80 per cut off date. Looking at the website for the last scholarship offers, about 100 people applied so only 20 people were unsuccessful.

Departmental Travel Funding

During the period between my undergraduate and postgraduate studies, I applied and got accepted for vacation work in Web services at CSIRO in Canberra. Most people take the 3 months off to relax, drink beer and take a break from studies. I went to Canberra to read about and implement Web services.

This time twelve months ago I was working towards a paper for monitoring composite Web services, focusing on the challenges, considerations and difficulties when doing so. The paper was submitted twice before it was accepted this time round to SEIW in conjunction with ICDE in Istanbul, Turkey. I will be the representative going half way around the world to present it. It has also been requested as a journal paper but we don't think we have the time or the resources to do the additional implementation and new work additions.

As it is not work directly related to my PhD, I will refrain from using my industry sponsors as a form of funding, although they said if I but their institution on, it might be okay. But for now, I am currently trying to get all the funding to go over there from the department. The department of computer science and software engineering will give me $1500 if I meet the following requirements:

• I am an author of the paper
  
• My university affiliation under my name is The University of Melbourne, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering
  
• The paper will go into a publication that has an isbn
  
• I give a department/postgraduate seminar explaining my works.
  

Mine is booked in for 30th March, the Friday that isn't a public holiday before I leave for Turkey. Postgraduate seminars a preferred to be on a Friday. I contacted CSIRO and they said it wasn't a problem for me to add my affiliation instead of CSIRO under my name, and they can cover registration for me.

Hopefully I can get some more money from the school of graduate studies for the additional expenses.

Paper reference:
Kerry Taylor, Paul Brebner, Michael Kearney, Dana Zhang, Kelly Lam and Vladimir Tosic. Towards Declarative Monitoring of Declarative Service Compositions. In Proceedings of The 2nd International Workshop on Services Engineering (SEIW07) in conjunction with 23rd International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2007), Istanbul, Turkey, April 2007.

That google scholarship (The Google 2006 Australia Anita Borg Scholarship)

As a fun side project, I track who views my websites and how they get to them. Recently, some people viewing this blog and my personal blog have searched in relation to the Australia Anita Borg Memorial Google scholarship I won recently. For some reason, my blogs come up when people search for things related to the scholarship, like winners, essays and the sort. All the searchers so far reside in Europe (I had some from France and Sweden yesterday). At the retreat in Sydney, the conveners mentioned that they were going to be starting it in Europe and I guess the announcements are out and potential applicants are wanting to know more about it.

It's quite keen of them to be Googling and searching through blogs to finding out what other finalists and winners did in the application process. Quite clever in some aspects because it might give them some insight. I don't know the exact details but the applications are due at the end of January and the essay questions would be similar. I'm not particularly sure how much I want to write about my application because I feel that potential applicants from Europe may be reading this right now!

But since the scholarship is for such a great cause and Anita's legacy should live on through us, I may give a few details on what I wrote. Sharing and networking is what it's all about. Let's just say my responses to the first and third question was very technical, focusing mainly on the contributions and the motivations to why I would/have chosen such projects. The second question I loved because I got to write about myself. I talked about my teachings and community service. And finally, the last question I went a little overboard. A similar idea to what I had in mind was actually presented at the last Grace Hopper Conference for Celebration of Women. For my proposal, I planned exactly where each portion of the money went, where it would be spent and prospective locations. I also rang up venues to find exact prices and availability dates. There may also have been a time line. This time line included when advertisements should be placed and how publicity should proceed.

Please if you've read this through a search or whatever technique you used, leave a comment and let me know how you went/go. Also if you're in Data mining or security, please feel free to look around this blog and leave any ideas. Anita's all about networking with more women in technical fields of computer science. If you're not sure if you should apply or not, do it. It's great fun. You never know, you might win! But even if you don't, it's a great opportunity to just have a go. The ladies at Google are fantastic and it was great to meet other women from Australia who shared my interests.

Florida here I come

I think I've just been told that I will be getting funding to go to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing next year. It's part of my Anita Borg Scholarship. Omg woo. Meghan from Google just sent an email saying I will be getting my $5K in addition to support for the 2007 Grace Hopper Conference in Orlando, Florida.

The Google 2006 Australia Anita Borg Scholarship

And the winner is... me. After I thought I received the Google scholarship to go to the 2006 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women and Computing, I emailed Alistair Moffat to say "thank-you" for telling me about the scholarship opportunity. (I write "I thought" because I didn't actually get the Google scholarship. I thought I did because that's what I applied for and I received money for what I applied for. But I later discovered while I was at the conference that the money actually came from NFS/Grace Hopper/someone other than Google. But funding is funding, wherever it comes from and I got the opportunity to travel). Now, being the top bloke that Alistair is, he said congrats and told me about another women in computing opportunity: The Google 2006 Australia Anita Borg Scholarship. So I thought why not. I'll apply closer to the deadline.

The Sunday before it was due (it was due on a Friday), I read the applicant criteria and application requirements. I needed two character references and I needed to answer a series of essay type questions. They essay questions were not a problem, but the thought of extracting a character reference in 5 days or less out of Rao was somewhat of a concern. Rao is a very busy man and he was not one of those people that say write me a letter and I'll sign it (which is good because I don't like doing things like that). In the end, Rao made a time for me at 7pm on the Thursday where we worked on it together. He is one busy man.

My other character reference was from Rita Manesis who is the coordinator of SALP, a leadership program that supports volunteer work in the community. I participated in the program in 2004 and I still do some of the volunteer work that I started in the program. I'm buying both of these people a plant for Christmas or something.

So anyway, that was the application process and while I was in San Diego, I receieved an email informing me that I was a finalist for the scholarship and I was going to Sydney for a retreat with the other finalists. There was 16 finalists in total, 8 ugrad and 8 postgrad selected from over 60 applicants. I had my two phone interviews and last week, Neetu Vacin rang up to tell me that I was the postgrad winner for Australia.

I got back from Sydney on Saturday where I spent time with the other finalists and Google people at Hilton and the Google Sydney office. The other women I met were incredible, in the accomplishments, in their intelligence and in their abilities. But what's more amazing is the fact that I was picked as the winner. There is one postgrad winner and one ugrad winner. There is one postgrad winner in all of Australia and that winner is me. Quite an amazing feeling, really. This is also the first year the Anita Borg scholarship has come to Australia. So I'm the first. Awesome.

Now all I have to do is some real research to justify all my awards. Hmmm.

Also see: some hints on the application process.