Resources for Students
I have collected some general resources that should be useful to honours,
masters and PhD students. If you are working with me make sure you read
the last section carefully.
$$$ - Scholarships
I do not have specific funding to support PhD students. I can provide
feedback on your research proposal to help your application get a
better ranking which should result in getting one of the scholarships
below.
You should be aware of how local PhD applications are evaluated using the "Research Training Scheme". A point sheet from 2005 can be found here or you can always search Google.
International PhD applicants usually apply for the highly competitive
Endeavour International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (IPRS) and
UTS scholarships (IRS) which have deadlines around the end
of August for the following year.
UTS Links
Macquarie Links
Finding Research Papers
Good Books and Style Guides
Good Software
Articles and Collections
If you are working with me
-
Things to do
-
Keep a research journal. Write about what you are thinking, reading, implementing.
At the end of every month read over the last months entries to ties any
loose ends, catch any goals that might have slipped through the cracks.
-
Keep me updated by email once a week, and demand to have a research meeting
at least once every two weeks.
-
Record bibliographic information, keywords and a couple of lines of comments
about every paper you read. I recommend using EndNote, but you can also
use a plain text file and use Bibtex style entries.
-
Attend seminars, give seminars. Take notes during a seminar. In addition
to the content of the seminar also examine how many slides the speaker
used, what were the speakers' good points versus bad points.
-
Read somebody else's thesis as you are starting on your own. Look at how
they construct and defend their argument.
-
Find workshops, conferences, journals that might be relevant to your research.
Try to keep up to date on them.
-
Prepare topic or person based files preferably on hard-copy so you can
quickly browse through them.
-
Make notes as you read a paper. This will help you remember what the strong/weak
points were next time you look at the paper.
-
Talk about your work. Tell your brother/sister about what you are working
on. You must be able to describe the essence of your topic in a couple
of sentences. You might find yourself hiking, breathless and trying to
describe your research at the same time (I did!). Be prepared.
-
Write down your ideas. You will be judged by your writing, by your thesis.
If you do not write your ideas, and show them to others nobody will ever
get to know about your brilliance. Write your ideas, submit them to conferences,
journals. Give them to your colleagues to critique.
-
Believe in yourself and believe that you can succeed through hard work.
You are competing with people who might have worked on the problem you
are working on for the last 10-15 years. They might have decades of research
experience. You can still make a contribution. Know what was done
before you and build on the shoulders of giants (instead of reinventing
the wheel).
-
Things not to do
-
Do not show up at a meeting. Show up at a meeting 15 minutes late, without
a notebook, a pen or any idea about what you want to talk about.
-
Do not spell check you paper or chapter before giving it to me. Spell check
even your emails, I do not want to read things like "b4 u come bak..."
-
Not take notes during a meeting hoping to remember everything discussed
-
Do not imitate my bad habits. Try to find multiple role models.
-
Hide, avoid, disappear because you are stuck, you have not done something
or you feel like a failure. If you are stuck on something ask for help.
You are not expected to solve all problems by yourself. I might have
asked you for the impossible and not recognised it, or worse we might have
misunderstood each other.
First Steps
Goal: To become familar with the literature and to better define the project.
The length of this phase can be a couple of weeks, a couple of months
or almost a whole year for phd students.
- Read the 'Resources for Students' web page under my web pages
- Start with the readings I give you or start from readings you have chosen and give me copies. Write a summary of each paper including:
- Enter the paper's citation details to Endnote (or some other bibliography software). You might want to also keep the abstract and short summary in Endnote, but the longer review should be in a separate document.
- What problem were the authors addressing
- What was the solution the proposed
- How did they test their solution (user testing, new algorithm)
- Who else, what other groups are working in that area
- What would be the next steps, future research in this area
- Find at least 2 other papers that is related to the authors work using Citeseer, Google, DBLP, etc
- Read a couple of other papers that follow from the readings that are related to the are and write a similar summary for them.
- Write a 2 page summary of your project. What problem are you solving, how will you approach it, how will you support your conclusion.
- Email me a report of what you are upto every week and we'll meet in 2-3 weeks time!