Study a research degree

Toby Slade (00:00):

Well welcome everyone. My name is Toby Slade. I'm the Director of HDR in the Faculty. When they asked me to do the job, I was actually a little bit mystified as to what HDR meant. I thought it meant high dynamic range on a television, but it actually, it means Higher Degrees by Research to distinguish it from Higher Degrees by Coursework. So there are of course, a lot of great masters programs that are by coursework in the faculty that I look after, or the degrees that are by research. DAB has about 115 students doing PhDs and masters by research.

            And so today I wanted to talk to you. First of all, I wanted to sort of talk to you about the romance of doing a PhD, about the luxury of research, how it really is the deepest sort of conversation you can have on a topic and really one of the great privileges and luxuries that can be granted to you by society, to actually spend three or four years thinking about something and having that paid for by the government, by society, because that knowledge is so important. It is something that's very hard. There's lots of people go off the rails somewhere in their PhD, but it's also something that we hope we have enough support that you can always get back on the rails and in the end, it can be something that's incredibly rewarding for your life.

            Just a little bit of trivia just to help with the romance. When you actually do finish a PhD, the registrar of the university contacts the governor-general and the governor-general contacts the queen to officiate your change of title, so you can actually call yourself a doctor it's within the gift of the crown to change your title officially. So I always thought that was a very cool thing that happened at the end of your PhD is that it actually goes through the highest levels of government so that you can be recognized for the work you've done.

            UTS and DAB, in particular, is a world leader in practice spaced research, so that is research that is grounded in an artistic project or a design project or an architectural project that you do and then the knowledge that is created via that project. They say Australia is actually a world leader in that with RMIT and the United States and Canada at the moment are sort of playing catch up to try and develop that expertise too. Another great reason to study at UTS is the flexibility we offer. There's all sorts of great industry placements and part-time arrangements that are, I think, often more generous here than at other institutions.

            We also have a lot of great cotutelle agreements, that's agreements with other universities, so that you can perhaps do part of your masters or PhD at one of our partner institutions around the world, if that was the way your project was heading. In the background to me now is the UTS DAB research site. And this is something you can go back and check later, particularly when I sort of talk about our supervision strength. But you can see here, this part sort of explains some of the research, well, I've got to move, expertise that we have in the faculty.

            We are a particular leader in Design Agency and Designing Futures, the Fashion Futures Lab in the School of Design, the Design Innovation Research Center, which is about to be renamed and reconceptualized, but it is a research institute that looks at designing change. Social justice in the built environment and society, the School of Built Environment has a number of areas of expertise around technological implementation, but also in sort of sustainable built environments. The Material Ecology Lab, that's mainly in the School of Design, but also has links into the School of Engineering, the School of Science and to other parts of the faculty is also sort of a research lab that is aimed at large social change and changes in the way we interact with the material world.

            The School of Architecture is also a leader in sort of technological and industrial transformation. One example of great work being done, Professor Tim Schork recently, with the help of his students, produced this amazing 3D printed air conditioning system that uses biomimicry to efficiently, far, far, far more efficiently, than the sort of steel box construction of most air conditioning, cool buildings and reduce the amount of carbon we produce. And finally, we have a particular specialization in visualization, both in the School of Architecture and the School of Design in the clusters of visual knowledges. As well as that, you'll find many professors that are able to supervise historical, more traditional historical or theoretical subjects as well and that is one of the great strengths of this faculty is it has a really wide variety of scholars working on a number of areas.

            So if you were sort of intrigued and wanted to know more about how this would practically happen, you need two things. First of all, you have to sort of develop a proposal. So you need an idea of what you want to study and some sort of structure of the research you intended to do. The second thing you need is to find a supervisor. And if you do go to another part of the website, we have this section, find the right supervisor, and you can see this will have all our, what we call category one supervisors. So there are supervisors that can lead your research across the schools. This is professors from the School of Design. A bit further down, there's the School of Architecture and the School of Built Environment there as well. So you really can see what the specialties of the supervisors are and who you'd like to start your research with. We have team supervision at UTS, which means that you will need at least two supervisors. Some people can have up to five to sort of advise you on how to best progress your research.

            Another important thing to know is that most full-time projects will receive some sort of government funding. There is Fee Waiver Scholarships that almost all people will receive from the government that waive your fees for a full-time research degree. Then there is a Faculty Level Scholarship. Faculty Level Scholarship is about $30,000 a year, so I think about $110,000 all up from the government over the four years. You probably know that the poverty level in Australia is about $27,000, so it's not really that might over the poverty level so it really would be a scholarship that you'd have to supplement with a little bit of part-time work and hopefully work within the university itself, as most PhDs eventually do teaching here or get research assistant work. There is a higher level scholarship that the university also offers of $40,000. It's a bit more competitive. We normally have two or three of those every round.

            Just before I open it up to questions, and I hope there's lots of questions because the whole purpose of Higher Degrees by Research is that it really is a tailored experience and it really is your own research journey that you craft yourself, so every student in this space is different. The last thing I wanted to mention is that if you are a domestic student, that is, if you have a permanent residency or you're an Australian citizen or you already have a student visa, the application period for session two, that is beginning in July, next year, will open mid-January on the 15th of January and it will close by the 30th of April. It's really important that you approach a supervisor early and start a conversation with them because the final application documents that you have to submit include sort of a number of important statements about how your research would work with your supervisor.

            So it's important that you approach someone early on in that process and leave yourselves lots of time to sort of refine that proposal and that application. If you are an international student, and this of course is all up in the air because we are unsure exactly of the status of borders, but if you're an international student, it starts a little bit earlier on the 1st of November, so it's already open for the next session and it will close on the 15th of January, just because we need a little bit more time to process visas and things for that session two in 2022. So that's all the formal comments I wanted to make, but hopefully you have lots of questions or comments or-