Graduate Centre

Welcome

Murdoch University is a small but research intensive University with a strong commitment and tradition of quality postgraduate research training. If you come to us from undergraduate studies at Murdoch you will already be familiar with the staff, facilities and ambience, whereas those who have come from other Universities will need time to discover Murdoch University and all that it offers. To help you during your time at Murdoch, there are several places you can immediately turn to: your supervisor, the Postgraduate Director in your Faculty, Murdoch University Postgraduate Student Association (MUPSA) which you may join and which has a research officer to assist with student issues, and the Graduate Centre in the Division of Research and Development in the Chancellery. You should make full use of these.

The most important decision you will make is your choice of supervisor/s. For most of you this postgraduate experience will be your first exposure to a long term research program. The personality and integrity of your supervisor/s will therefore play a major role in how you develop as a researcher. Later in life many past postgraduate research students say that their supervisor/s have had a lifelong influence on the way in which they deal with their future career. Our excellent supervisors are among the most highly qualified and committed in Australia.

Murdoch University prides itself on the quality of the research experience it provides to postgraduate students. This year we will put into place a range of new initiatives to ensure that generic skills needed for research and a future research career are provided to all postgraduate students, through courses or other mechanisms. These will cover such topics as: planning a research proposal, thesis and journal article writing, intellectual property issues, presenting a seminar, career planning, IT skills, linking your research to the private sector, and assisting you in obtaining a position in the end, to name but a few. In addition we plan to allow selected postgraduate students to be involved in a small way with university teaching providing that it does not conflict with the progress of their research.