Industry opportunities
Enhance your research and develop your career with an internship
Your PhD journey is about more than research. It's also about developing a range of skills and experiences during your time at the University that will set you up for success in the future - and help you become a leader in your field.
All HDR students are encouraged to do an internship either part-time alongside their research, or intensively over three to six months. An internship involves completing a project or undertaking activities within a workplace that are designed to develop your research knowledge and skills.
An internship can help you turn your knowledge into real world impact and provide fresh inspiration and ideas for your research. It can reveal career paths and options you didn’t know existed and help you build important professional networks for the future. It will also challenge you to develop your skills in new ways that will enhance your employability in academic and commercial spheres.
Many people assume that industry internships are only relevant to people in science and technology or engineering disciplines. However, industry refers to a range of sectors - including government, NGOs and education - so an industry internship can be relevant for many students from other disciplines.
It’s important to start thinking about doing an internship early on in your candidature, as it takes time to secure an opportunity and to plan how to balance it effectively alongside your PhD and other activities.
Be sure to have some early discussions about your internship ideas with your supervisor. There are a range of ways that you can find an internship during your PhD, including applying to advertised opportunities, asking your supervisor about their industry connections, and using APR.Intern, Australia’s primary HDR internship service provider.
The University has partnered with APR.Intern to provide domestic and international HDR students with exciting 3-to-6-month internship opportunities in various sectors, including healthcare, defence, government, and environment.
HDR students can visit the APR.Intern website for a list of current opportunities and detailed information about the application process.
Before applying, a student’s lead supervisor needs to sign the Student Approval Form (pdf, 3.6MB) approving their student’s participation and, ideally, agree to act as their academic mentor for the placement. The student sends the signed form to the GRS (grs.internships@sydney.edu.au), who then complete an assessment to check the student is progressing well with their PhD. The proposed timing or duration of the internship may need to be changed if it is within six months of the planned thesis submission date (RSD).
HDR students can also submit an EOI directly to an APR Intern to be considered for future opportunities. They can also include a list of potential industry partners they’d like to explore on their behalf.
If you or your supervisor have a relationship with an industry partner and would like to organise an internship, you must inform the Graduate Research School via email grs.internships@sydney.edu.au. We can work to support you and help develop your internship opportunity.
This is important to ensure that you are insured, and appropriately credited for the work that you do. For example, you may be eligible for an extension of candidature.
As you plan your internship, you can use the Milestones and Goals functions within the Research Education Candidature System (RECS) to help organise your activities.
Students doing an APR.Intern organised internship receive a stipend payment of about $3,000 per month of their placement, which is administered through the Scholarship Office.
A student’s primary scholarship will typically be paused during this time.
Students must be enrolled for the duration of their internship, but the University will allow flexibility in how students accommodate the internship into their program of study.
Students may be eligible for an extension of their thesis submission date and scholarship payments to accommodate the time that they spent on an internship. Extensions are processed six months prior to the thesis submission date, so it is important to record the internship to ensure that your extension request is automatically approved. Your internship needs to be DESE-compliant to be eligible – please contact grs.internships@sydney.edu.au for more details.
Students may have the option to apply for an extension to their thesis submission date and scholarship payments to accommodate the time they have spent interning.
Your internship needs to be DESE-compliant to be eligible. Please contact grs.internships@sydney.edu.au for more details.
In most cases, students will assign any project and internship IP to the industry partner, while any background research IP will be retained by the student/University.
Students will always be required to sign a Student Deed or similar document outlining the conditions for IP, and they should seek legal advice from the Sydney University Postgraduate Representative Association (SUPRA) to ensure they understand any potential impact on their primary research.
Students are covered by the University’s personal accident insurance for internships organised by APR.Intern.
You are encouraged to update the milestones and goals section of the Research Education Candidature System (RECS) at the beginning and end of your internship to capture how the experience has enhanced your research and professional development. Potentially, these notes could be used as evidence of your progress in your Progress Evaluation Meeting (PEM) discussions. You will also be asked in your PEM form whether you have completed an internship - please ensure that you indicate any internship that you have completed.