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.

Planning my Grace Hopper Trip

Early in May, Professor Alistair Moffat sent an email around informing postgraduate and later year students of a conference opportunity in San Diego for women in computing. This conference is The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Google was offering a Global Community Scholarship to help students outside of the US attend the event. I thought this is something that I could potentially apply for.

The application was due on 1st June 2006 and I remembered to re-read Alistair’s email on the night of 27th May. I of course, was leaving the country at 5am on the morning of 29th May for Infoscale ’06. So instead of preparing for my presentation, I spent 28th May writing an essay about myself. This seemed to pay off as early in August, I was notified of being awarded a full scholarship to attend the 2006 Grace Hopper
Celebration of Women in Computing. Woo. 83 full scholarships were awarded out of 550 applicants. The odds weren’t bad but it’s still exciting to be accepted. Plus, I’ve never been to the states before so I’m fully excited. Yes, I just used the word, “fully”.

After the initial shock and making this face O_O, I realised that I now needed to book flights to the states. I’ve never had to plan a trip like this for myself before so the organisation itself was a learning experience.

I emailed the organisers of the event and received an email back informing me that I required a Visa. This was a bit worrying. Then I received an email asking if I was flying from China because another scholarship recipient was travelling from the China and wanted to know if I wanted to be her travel buddy. This was more worrying. Turns out they knew I was born in China and thought I might be in China right now. I guess I could have been.

After the initial confusion and reading fine print, I do not need a visa and I have no travel buddy. But at least I know the name of a girl who was born in the same country as me and has an interested in computer science. I look forward to meeting her in October.

I am leaving Australia on 28th September and returning 9th October. I will spend my time before the conference in Oakland, California, visiting a David Sun, very good friend at UC Berkeley. He is currently studying towards his PhD in Computer Science at Berkeley and is a very smart cookie. I’ve known him since I was 10 and he used to hate me because I use to channel surf too much when we watched TV together. Hopefully he is over how annoying I used to be and won’t mind too much that I will be hanging around him for the weekend.

I will fly into San Diego on the evening of 2nd October and spend the 3rd October in Tijuana. This decision is based on the fact that San Diego’s main attractions are the zoo and sea world. Shopping for a day in Mexico seems to be more appealing to me. I haven’t told my parents yet but I’m sure they will see the photos after I come back from Mexico.

The 4th-7th October will be dedicated to the conference. I look forward to meeting some awesome women of computing from around the world. It will definitely be an invaluable experience that I will never forget. I especially look forward to the ideas that will be presented to me by the various presenters.

Right after the conference, I will board a flight on the 7th October and arrive back in Melbourne on the 9th. I have tutorials that I have to teach on the 10th.

It is two weeks before I go and everything seems to be organised. I have my travel insurance, I’ve booked my accommodation and my flights have been paid for and confirmed. I have all the receipts I need for reimbursement at the conference. I hope I haven’t forgotten anything. I guess I’ll know in 2-3 weeks time.