[Courses] [careers] Re: Courses Digest, Vol 20, Issue 5

[Terri Oda]

On Feb 3, 2005, at 9:48 PM, Gareth Anderson wrote:
> I always thought that PhD students are only sponsored for the PhD 
> research.

That depends on where you go!  In many universities, you also work as 
either a teaching assistant or lecturer, and you may be a research 
assistant for work not directly your own.

> Was it a combination of Scholarships which allowed you to earn that
> amount of money? (I haven't heard of that kind of thing in Australia
> before..)

I currently hold three scholarships: one from the faculty of CS, one 
from the university, and one from a national funding agency for 
science/engineering.  The latter is one of the larger scholarships 
given out in this country, so I'm have a unusually high level of 
funding.  On top of that, I work as a teaching assistant.  (This term, 
I'm marking and helping students in our Internet Programming course, 
which teaches them basic HTML/CSS/javascript, XML, and perl to glue it 
all together.  Their assignments this year have them working towards 
building a site that allows people to have personalized headlines pages 
that read from RSS feeds, to give you an idea.)

In the past, I've also held the research assistantship I mentioned and 
a provincial scholarship (I can't hold either of those this year 
because of some regulations on each of those).

I gather this level of funding is much more common in the US than it is 
here in Canada -- it seems that most universities there won't even 
accept doctoral students unless they can be funded rather considerably!

The amount of funding I have is unusual for Canada since competition 
for the national and even provincial scholarships is fairly fierce, and 
there aren't too many similarly large scholarships available from 
industry.   The university is only allowed to send out a limited number 
of applications for the national scholarships (I believe it's around 60 
for my university, which has around 2,500 grad students, although some 
of them would apply to other funding agencies based upon their field.  
And even then, most of the students are turned down.  It's a pretty big 
deal to hold one of these scholarships.)

All of my scholarships have different durations, so my funding will 
decrease as the years go by unless I find new scholarships -- I've got 
three applications in now, and will probably be applying for more 
later.

  Terri