How do postgrads work?

Endymion

Something I've been wondering about recently, how does the system work? Do you pay for a position, is it state funded, are there grants, research and taught. What is the story with them, hwo are they structured. When you see postgrads giving tutorials and the like, are they also paying fees? or do they get paid?

Stargal

All postgrads cost money - a taught masters in say, Arts will be around the €3000 mark (v approx) whereas a more practical one will cost more. I'm about to start a Journalism Masters and it's €7,200 for the year (yowza!)

If you qualify for a grant from your local authority as an undergrad then you can get it again as a postgrad, and they'll also pay the fees for you up to a maximum of about €5800 (again, approx).

Some courses will let you go straight into a PhD straight after your undergrad degree but a lot specify that you have to have a Masters first. Masters can be either taught or research-based; taught is pretty much like being an undergrad with lectures and often a dissertation/project at the end of the year. Research ones usually lead on to a PhD, where the student continues on in their area of study under the supervision of a member of the academic staff in the department.

The postgrads who give tutorials do indeed get paid. I've a friend starting a PhD out in UCDDDD and he's getting paid a lot of money for taking tutorials, marking essays and the like. Nice work if you can get it.

Oh and I think you can apply for funding and grants (from both private and public sources) for research Masters but they're usually for PhDs.

Are you thinking about doing a postgrad? Or just curious?

Oh and you might want to change the title of this topic - postgrades?

notjim

This is only so quick sketch of the situation.

Postgraduates are usually payed; they are funded either out of research grants, by one of the research councils or by tcd. The first sort of money comes through a member of faculty, the others are applied for directly by the student. To become a post-graduate you therefore need to find a supervisor who will supervise them, you need to be accepted by the university, a 2.1 or peferably a first is required for this, along with reference letters and you need to get a source of funding.

Research grants are grants given directly to faculty to do their research, they are awarded competitively and pay for equipment, post-docs, research visitors etc and often for some number of postgraduates. The researcher then has discretion as to who to offer a position to, subject to college approval. Research grant most often come from Science Foundation Ireland, but can also come from the Health Research Board, the HEA, the Wellcome Trust, the EU or others.

The Research Councils, IRCSET and IRHSS give scholarships directly to students, there are usually two rounds of applications every year, the students have already been accepted by a supervisor, but the councils mostly judge the quality of the applicants. There is some indication that this system will change in the future.

TCD also gives out post-graduate scholarships, these scholarships are probably the easiest to get, but the post-grads have to do a certain amount of tutorial teaching or lab supervision. In the case of the other awards, the post-graduates often teach, but for extra money.

Postgraduates are usually payed about 14k, this isn't very much, but, obviously, it makes them more employable in the future, it is the only route to an academic research career, and for many people, it is an exciting and rewarding time.

Similar systems operate in other countries and there is a strong arguement for going abroad to do a PhD.

Endymion

I thinking about doing one, there seems to be plenty of palces available in the two departments I'm in. I was just wondering how it was structured. If I had to leave to get the money together to do one, It would be highly unlikely I would coem back for it.

ApeXaviour

Carnivore wrote:

I thinking about doing one, there seems to be plenty of palces available in the two departments I'm in.

What are these departments? Whether you get paid and what type of postgrad work you do differs a lot depending on what you study...

Endymion

Cs And Electronics

ApeXaviour

notjim wrote:

This is only so quick sketch of the situation.

Postgraduates are usually payed; they are funded either out of research grants, by one of the research councils or by tcd. The first sort of money comes through a member of faculty, the others are applied for directly by the student. To become a post-graduate you therefore need to find a supervisor who will supervise them, you need to be accepted by the university, a 2.1 or peferably a first is required for this, along with reference letters and you need to get a source of funding.

First of all great post.

notjim wrote:

There is some indication that this system will change in the future.

How do you mean? Will they base it more on what type of research it is? From what I see a lot of people apply to ircset, very very few by comparison get it.

notjim wrote:

Similar systems operate in other countries and there is a strong arguement for going abroad to do a PhD.

Would you still say that is so? With the current economic climate and the government's unprecedented investment in "4th level" education. Unless, either you could get yourself into a really leading university (for whatever field), the course/research you want to do isn't available here or you just really really want to do it abroad I'd say there isn't much argument to leave the country.

I really would like to do it abroad (japan, canada) but from my research I havent really found better opportunity than in Ireland.

I thinking about doing one, there seems to be plenty of palces available in the two departments I'm in. I was just wondering how it was structured. If I had to leave to get the money together to do one, It would be highly unlikely I would coem back for it.

Taught masters in your area are not funded (bar scholarship). So generally you would have to pay fees. So your more preferable option is to do a research postgrad. This I think notjim explained excellently.

The only thing I think I should add is that (at least in the sciences) you usually commit to a research PhD with your supervisor. However you apply for a research masters and then after a year transfer into the PhD. It's just a matter of procedure more than anything and is apparently relatively painless.

notjim

Sorry; I should of said my earlier post refered only to PhDs and research masters.

To answer ApeXaviours questions . . . and I'm sorry for the long and technical post . . .

While it seems a good idea to have some PhD places funded directly from the research councils, if the numbers are going to increase, as the government says they will, there are two problems with the IRCSET method of allocating places.

The first problem is subsidiarity, the principle that any descision should be made by at lowest level competent to make it, in this case this principle would dictate that departments would make a better choice of who to give PhD funding to than a central council would. This is pretty clear in the case of IRCSET, as well as having a low success rate, they sometimes make some bizaare descisions, turning down some very good candidates.

The second problem, certainly as far as the government is concerned, is that the current system doesn't easily allow them to force the universities to provide all the stuff they want included in a PhD programme, taught courses including courses in entrepenurial skill, communications skills etc. The proposal is that in future IRCSET and IRCHSS will fund graduate schools formed out of collections of departments; these will run PhD programmes and will have funding to pay for students they will pick themselves, the amount of funding the graduate school gets will be adjusted from time to time according to how good the graduate students are, how well they succeed in finishing on time, writting papers, getting jobs etc.

Obviously Irish academics have mixed feelings about this, as they do about everything. It threatens to erode the apprenticeship model of PhD research and, it is clear, not every department will manage to get funded as part of graduate school, contributing to the process of distributing specializations between the universities. On the hand, it sounds like it will mean tons more money, great handfuls raining down on the lucky. Anyway, all of this is being talked about, but won't happen this year or the next, not least because there is a battle among the research councils, SFI etc, for control of graduate education.

As for going abroad, accoding to the THES TCD is the 111th best university in the world, obviously this exact figure is crap, but it is true that there is a class of university above ours: "great" universities, universities which have confidence in the value of knowledge for its own sake, a sense of being at the center of the research adventure and that are stops on the migration of the international academic jet set. We are the Irish Univesity that is closest to being a great university, but we aren't one. However, the best TCD undergraduates can get PhD places in universities like Cambridge, Harvard, UCSF, UofT, ETH Zurich, etc and they often get on great when they are there. If you can go to a great university, you should, its more exciting, you get to make contact with the best people and if you want to be an academic researcher, it makes it much easier to get a job.

On this last point, great universities produce many more PhDs than they can employ, so there is a drift downwards, your PhD university tends to be better than your Post-doc university which tends to be better than the university where you get a job. Count how many good TCD schools have TCD PhDs, no one person in the maths department, for example. In Universites like ours its sometimes, but not always, a bad sign when someone is given a job who has only worked locally, it usually means someone higher up is empire building, employing a collegue who has no academic existence outside their fealy to the higher-up.

Finally, we haven't completely succeeded in creating a proper PhD atmosphere here, an atmosphere where graduate students feel themselves to be part of an immortal and heroic enterprise and work, willingly, like people inspired with a religeous fever. If you see what I mean.

punka

ApeXaviour wrote:

The only thing I think I should add is that (at least in the sciences) you usually commit to a research PhD with your supervisor. However you apply for a research masters and then after a year transfer into the PhD. It's just a matter of procedure more than anything and is apparently relatively painless.

It's the same in the humanities - generally you're registered as an MLitt student and then after a year or so (once you've provided two satisfactory pieces of written work) you can transfer to PhD status.

notjim wrote:

UofT

w00t!

Endymion

That was an enjoyable post notJim

fiddlestick

It should also be noted that, IRCSET expect phd's to be completed in three years which is a bit crazy!Four is far more realistic.
if you are thinking of electronics(Research wise), everyone I know who applied for the 8k+fees trinity research awards got one...its worth going for, although it might be a bit late now.Although its a pittance to live on in dublin , it might be one to investigate.
Electronics are very active in looking for post grads, talk to a supervisor in the area you are interested in.
I dont know bout computers though...thats for some one else to answer.