Australian students should apply for an Australian Postgraduate Award (APA). The APA takes care of all your university fees and also pays a stipend of $17,071 (tax free) per year for either one (Masters) or three (PhD) years. Students are able to live well on this amount of money in Canberra. Download the application form.
To win an APA, you generally need to have a first class honours, good undergrad marks and good letters of recommendation. Students with second class honours occasionally are admitted but only if they have an exceptional record of achievement (such as publications). Approximately 78 APA's are given out at the ANU each year. In general, it is extremely difficult and rare to win an APA at ANU to do a Masters, only 8 masters level scholarships are offered across the entire university.
If you are interested in applying for an APA to work in my lab, then you must first contact me and check out the Ecology, Evolution and Systematics web page. Unsupported applications have no chance. Applications are due at the end of October with decisions being made by early December for a start date early the following year.
Part-time Students: If you wish to go part-time then you would probably have to work on the side (as APA scholarships are only for full time students) and might also have to pay HECS, but HECS exemptions are sometimes given. Generally, I am not interested in having part-time students, but we can talk about possibilities.
Unless you are independently wealthy and can afford to pay enourmous annual fees (plus living expenses) or have scholarship money from your own country to pay these fees, then foreign students must win an Australian scholarship. The International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (IPRS) (formally the OPRS for "overseas" student) pays the full university fees plus provides medical insurance and the cost of your airfare. A proportion of the people that win IPRS also win an ANU PhD Scholarship which pays a stipend to live on, but this is not automatic for IPRS winners. At present, the stipend is $17,071 per year (tax free) for one (Masters) or three (PhD) years. Students are able to live well on this amount of money in Canberra. You should visit the International Education Office website for more info. In general, it is extremely difficult and rare to win an IPRS at ANU to do a Masters. Download the application form.
There are some very important things to know about the IPRS:
1. IPRS scholarships are EXTREMELY competitive and many very good people miss out. Each year at the ANU several hundred applicants are in the running for only around 25 IPRS scholarships which are spread across the entire university.
2. Because of this extreme competitiveness, students applying to do a Masters are almost always excluded because they are not sufficiently competitive. Thus, students who already have a Masters and are applying to enter a PhD program will generally have a better chance.
3. Each graduate program must rank the IPRS candidates who have applied to study in their program. For example, if five people have applied to enter the PhD program in Ecology, Evolution and Systematics, then the EES academics must get together, rank those applicants from one to five, and then inform the University of this ranking. Given that there are more than 40 graduate programs at the ANU and only 25 IPRS scholarships, at best a program might only get one IPRS student (the person ranked number "1") and rarely might get those ranked both "1" and "2".
4. Because not all of the IRS winners also win the ANU PhD Scholarship to pay a stipend, you may have to find an alternative source of funding to live on.
If you are interested in applying for an IPRS to work in my lab, then you must first contact me and check out the Ecology, Evolution and Systematics web site. Unsupported applications have no chance. Applications are due at the end of August with decisions being made by late November for a start date early the following year.