If you are a foreign student and looking for a summer project, note that the Australian summer break is Dec - Feb. Our summer projects typically run Jan-Feb. While some colleagues are interested in summer projects conducted during the Northern Hemisphere Summer I am not, sorry... mainly because the Australian Winter Break in June/July is very short time (2+ weeks), your internship time would overlap with our examination period in June or with our first two weeks of second semester in July/August, both very busy times. Moreover the very short break during this time, I am typically involved with overseas conferences in my discipline and may not be around for a critical period in a summer project.. Sorry, no Northern Hemisphere 'summer' projects!
Having written that: if you are asking for an internship during our semester(s) or during our summer break (Dec-Feb), please read on and direct your application to me by email and convince me that you have something unique to offer to one of my projects and my group has something to offer to you. Read below...
Already @ RMIT: If you are already at RMIT and just completing your Honours or Masters (Research) studies, please read these notes and then come by and talk with me!
Already in my network: If you are at another university and your professor already collaborates with me and supports your application, please let's meet when I visit your professor or vice versa, or, if that is not possible, please send me an email including the reference email provided by your professor.
Whether RMIT or external student, before you can be supervised by me, ultimately you will need to apply for PhD candidature (effectively a student place) and pass the selection threshold prior to working with me and my group. I cannot take you on without you being eligible and RMIT University offering you a place. Regardless, whether you are an Australian or international prospective PhD student, you will find application proformas and processes on the RMIT web at http://www.rmit.edu.au/compsci/dr089 including links to contacts, entrance requirements, application proformas, scholarships, living in Melbourne, etc. There is also more information on the research areas, current research student projects and lots more here: http://www.rmit.edu.au/browse;ID=0pk3bz87xzv9z.
If you are already at RMIT there are also plenty of information sessions that may help you with this process. Otherwise, please follow the above links and contact me once you have sighted the material and have your application ready. Read on to see what additional documents are required.
CS Process: Our School has a policy of requiring you to (1) identify a supervisor in your application and (2) enforcing a probation period of a year before finalising PhD candidatures. (Effectively you have the option of submitting a Masters Thesis and exiting - just in case a 3+ years PhD project turns out not to be right for you.) If you are admitted, based on the supervisor choice you will be affiliated with her/his department, but will be able to look around and change supervision without many problems (other than finding someone suitable for your topic, or finding a topic suitable for both you and the new supervisor).
Before you list me as a supervisor, please contact me with a copy of your full application and an initial project brief (1/2 - 1 page) for the project you propose. Once again, please include a copy (preferably in pdf) of your full RMIT application proforma with copies of all required documents including undergraduate transcripts. Please look at my research bookmarks and our DSEA research lab pages to identify topics and supervisors of interest to you. I expect to see some papers referenced that are relevant to the area proposed including any of my papers that you think are relevant to your proposal and any of your papers and/or research theses (regardless of area proposed). It may be worthwhile looking at citations data, actually for any papers you cite. This will serve two purposes,
Having written this, I am always interested in excellent students in my area of research and open to innovative research proposals. The proposal does not have to be in a project that I am already conducting, although sometimes we advertise specific PhD themes in the context of current research projects and may have special grant scholarships for these.
Phd scholarships are very competitive (i.e. there are very many applications, despite the fact that they are not necessarily paying very highly). RMIT has a very good reputation internationally and the RMIT CS&IT School is a relatively large and nationally recognised group. CS&IT is a School in the Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) Portfolio (Faculty). Due to our size and breadth, we cover many application areas and can often provide excellent supervision and continuity in selected research strengths, including research strengths at the boundary of discipline groups in CS or between CS and Engineering etc. Several of our top researchers are involved with other disciplines and research centres.
Note that the bulk of scholarships is offered once a year with application deadline 31. October each year. A very small number of scholarships is available mid year. Sometimes special scholarships are offered by grant projects.
Depending on the type of scholarship, you will be able to take this with you if -- during the first probationary year -- supervisors change. However, grant (project) scholarships may not be transferable and the scholarship may be tied to a specific research area (not outcome). For example, Australian Postgraduate Award Industry (APAI) scholarships are in part funded by an industry partner and therefore tied to a specific research project.
Our school also has a policy of giving preference for paid tutoring, or, from time to time, paid programming tasks, to suitable PhD students. Note the word 'suitable'. Again the probation period will be the key to assessing suitability. There is no guarantee: of course you need to have excellent English skills and CS&SE knowledge to tutor a class, and you need to have excellent programming and systems skills to get casual programming or sysadmin work in the School or in a project. However, from experience, suitable students have had little difficulties in the past finding such casual work at the University and has often meant gaining access to interesting research projects and groups, sometimes close to their own PhD topic.
If you are at RMIT (PhD student close to completion or recently completed) come by and talk!
If you are elsewhere, and respond to an advertisement please make sure that you are including all the required information in your application.
If you are elsewhere, and would like to visit our Lab please have a look at the list of past seminars and visitors and contact me or the CS Seminar coordinator for more information on visits to our lab at RMIT.
I have high expectations re applicants to postdoc positions and I am somewhat opportunistic regarding research topics: If a potential candidate is brilliant and roughly in my area I will try to accomodate her/him. I am open for challenging research proposals. Please include a research brief (1 page) in your application with convincing points regarding the benefits of your work under my supervision (both what you bring to my group and what you expect to gain from my supervision and working in my group) and relate it to your longer term career goals. Be brief, make it simple and honest.
Some postdoc positions are tied to grants and require a particular skill set and research direction. Others are more open. For example, each year, the University offers a very small (and competitive) number of RMIT Fellowships for researchers not currently at RMIT.
1. Firstly look at the Australian government immigration policies, in particular the immigration scores as a function of skills shortage (general and employer nominated skills). Under certain constraints several computer professional skills, especially skills around software analysis, design, management and hence software engineering, are scoring high (See skilled migration pages for details.
2. Look at job market projection in other countries notably in the United States. Typically Australia follows the development with a delay of two to four years (depending on the relevant discipline). Due to the critical role of Information and Communication Technologies across all other market sectors, research disciplines and education, predictions for the ICT job market in the US are associated with the largest growth and with consistent growth until 2012. There are a number of places where you can find relevant statistics. You could start with this article quoting US Bureau of Labor Statistiscs predictions to 2012 (implying one million new IT jobs by 2012) or selected statistics and graphs comparing different IT professions.
3. Look at the demographics which see Australias population age significantly between 2004 and 2015-2020. Here I mean the balance between (or distribution of) ages in the Australian population is shifting significantly as 'baby boomers' are moving increasingly into retirement age. Now also consider the innovation factor of ICT: With very few other disciplines ICT is one of the fastest moving technologies. Do the maths! Early career professionals are driving this. Jobs shift where dusty, old-fashioned ICT jobs are maintaining and polishing an increasing base of existing technology while innovative jobs are continuously being generated to keep up with the pace of novel and faster moving technologies.
4. Do not make the mistake of equating university level ICT education with information technology you learned as primary and secondary (high-school) students in IT subjects at school. Primary and secondary students today grow up with basic ICT skills and computers are part of the furniture at school. However the excitement is in software and automation. Find out what is happending under hood in a Google cluster, in search for molecular structures to make new medicines, materials or implants, or, computer games! It is all in the software. What is being taught today and tomorrow at uni includes fundamentals that are not being taught at school. When you graduate as a bachelor you have only just started specialising. Learn to learn advanced methods, learn to automate and revolutionize other disciplines, learn software engineering and the underlying computer science fundamentals.
5. Look at the global spending cycles of large companies on ICT. Many companies go through cycles of ICT saving and spending of around 5-7 years following their cycles of accelerated or decelerated growth. Depreciation of ICT equipment for tax purposes is 3-5 years depending on equipment type and region. Companies in saving mode may want to squeeze a few more years out of their ICT infrastructure. Major upgrades in infrastructure often also mean upgrades in software and ICT processes and training. On the one hand, the overall costs of such investments is prohibitive to fast-tracking upgrades but leads to waves through retail, tourism and other industries upgrading their infrastructure. On the other hand, neglecting ICT capabilities can mean loss of competitiveness of enterprise processes. Often the legal and regulatory environment such as the recent changes in compliance and liability for ICT stuff-ups define a context pro such upgrades too, because they require best practice ICT. IDC and other research companies are predicting that non-ICT industries are just pulling into such an upgrade cycle again in 2006 and the following years and this will lead to a increased demand in ICT skills on top of the long-term trend.