u/Straight_Cupcake9435

Hey guys, I'm an international student at Deakin with an 82 WAM and no honors. I have been working as an RA at Deakin for the past 2 years under my supervisor and want to do a PhD in a subarea of Computer Science/Math/AI. I have 2 first-author manuscripts by now, 1 of them at a NeurIPS workshop and one of them submitted to ICLR (and optimistic that it would be an accept, but cant say anything right now with how noisy the entire process it). Both papers are highly relevant in the niche area that I want to do my PhD in.

The problem is my WAM and my lack of honors/masters. The exact area I want to do my PhD in is kind of niche, with only a few professors across Australia (one of them being at UniMelb) researching in this area and both of my papers are highly relevant to this area. I also have 2 years of software engineering/ML engineer experience locally.

Before I spend another 50,000$ behind an honors, which I really, really cannot afford, I need to know if I should contact my potential supervisor with my current profile, or if I should really just hold back and cough up the $50K. As there is really only one supervisor at Melbourne, I really do not want to waste my one chance to do a PhD at UniMelb.

There is a "gotcha" on the UniMelb website saying "you would be considered for a PhD if you have done either an honors year, or a masters (equivalent relevant research experience can be considered if neither of the two pre-requisites are fulfilled). Would my 2 years as an RA likely help my case?

I just need some general advice. I probably do not qualify for a PhD, but it is still worth asking here before making the decision to cough up the ~50K.

Hi AusAcademia

I am a third year (final year) student in Computer Science majoring in Computational Mathematics, currently studying at Deakin University. I am currently not enrolled for an Honors year (and the cutoff date has passed for this, so I potentially cannot enroll into an honors year anymore). Because I am an international student, if I were to enroll into an honors year, it would cost me 42,000$ just for one year - which I am not ready to spend under any condition.

I have been working as a Research Assistant under a senior lecturer here at Deakin for 1 year now. While working as an RA, I have led the day to day of a study whose resulting manuscript (of which I am the first-author of) is submitted to AAAI-27 and is currently under review. I will not go deeper into the details of the study, but I built the reproducible rendering, transcript mining, evaluation and integrity pipelines, served the models through vLLM, and conducted target clustered randomization tests, bootstrap inference, GEE/GLMM analyses and repository level sensitivity checks.

I was also one of the only undergraduates who got access to Deakin's High Performance Computing Slurm Cluster to run my experiments.

I am very interested in doing a PhD in the same field, but because of not having an honors or a masters, my path is slightly unconventional. University of Melbourne's website states that you must either have a 4 year degree or a masters degree or "Have a qualification, and have professional or other relevant experience or a combination of both, that are considered to be equivalent by the Selection Committee". I am currently dwelling on the hopes that one year of RA work with an under review (and hopefully accepted paper) counts as equivalent research experience by the committee, and hence acts as a substitute for the missing honors/masters year.

My current supervisor looks (I say looks because it is very difficult to read what they're thinking) very happy with my research (from what I have observed). I respect them a lot, as I would not have anything worth applying for a PhD if they hadn't given me that autonomy. Because Deakin (my current university) does not have this "equivalence clause", I cannot currently do a PhD at Deakin under my current supervisor. Hence, I am looking for alternate universities, mostly in Melbourne (and mostly looking at University of Melbourne or Monash). I have identified potential supervisors, and have started cold emailing them using my institutional email. These potential supervisors are people whose work I have personally read and think is clever, and are highly relevant to my field. Hence, the emails I send are extremely personalized, often propose an extension over their existing work, or if I could not identify an extension I emailed them with a proposal in the shared field that I had identified as a gap while doing my current research (and this is something I find really interesting).

I have also researched and have found out that some universities in the US accept a 3 year course (example: Princeton, Columbia, Berkeley). I realize that these universities are extremely competitive, and my chances of getting in are highly unlikely. To get a foot in the door, I researched PIs with newly opened labs who are actively looking for students and are particularly warm and inviting towards undergraduates, read their research over the past few weeks, and have emailed them slowly, 2 per day with highly personalized emails (some of their research is directly cited in my paper, so I believe its appropriate to email them). I know getting a Research Assistant/Intern position at these institutions is a big ask and is highly unlikely, so I asked for a scoped research project, and described how I could be of immediate help.

12 emails sent by now, none of them has replied to me.
2 of the 12 are from the University of Melbourne, and are highly relevant to my field - neither of the 2 has replied.
I just discovered this subreddit today, browsed a bit and found out that right now is the busiest time of the year, I don't want to waste my chances so I will not email remaining 2 potential supervisors at Monash/UniMelb just in case they miss my email.

Looking for all and any advice. Thanks for reading through!

>TLDR (AI generated): Final-year international CS/Computational Mathematics student at Deakin wants to pursue a PhD but cannot justify paying $42,000 for an honours year and may have missed the enrolment deadline anyway.

They have one year of substantial RA experience, led much of a study now under review at AAAI-27, handled advanced experimental and statistical work, and received undergraduate access to Deakin’s HPC cluster. They hope universities such as Melbourne may treat this research experience as equivalent to honours or a master’s under their admissions rules, since Deakin apparently will not.

They are contacting relevant supervisors at Melbourne, Monash, and highly competitive US universities with carefully personalised research proposals. After 12 emails, including two to Melbourne academics, they have received no replies. They are now wondering whether to pause further emails because it is a busy period and are seeking advice on PhD eligibility, supervisor outreach, timing, and alternative pathways.