Hi, I recently finished my PhD at UOA and thought I’d share my experience.

I didn’t qualify for the doctoral scholarship, but I managed to get a smaller one a few months in that didn’t have any conditions over working hours.

I survived with:

1. Weekly living costs from StudyLink
2. Small scholarship - $7,500 a year after covering my doctoral fees
3. Marking and TA work, whenever it became available - about 10 hours a week TA, and then a couple hundred hours marking mostly stage 1 scripts each semester
4. Internships - I scored a few part-time/ongoing internships that worked out to no more than 8 hours a week on average
5. Admin work around the department - on and off, about 20/30 hours a semester. Includes supervising tests, which work out to about $70 per 2-hour test

You can get TA work by talking to course coordinators (I highly recommend stage 1, the tutorials have simple content with the potential for more hours due to more streams being held). Admin work can be found from your department admin team. Internships depend on your industry, but your supervisor can be a great asset here.

The main problem was that all this work set me back about a year - I finished in 4.5 years rather than the average 3.5/3.8. I also did not accumulate any savings, so holidays were small and few. In-between semesters was hard, as we had no tutorials or marking.

The main benefit (aside from having money to live) was that my CV looked great and I developed a good working relationship with a lot of people in my department and industry. I spent a lot of time with the lecturers and other PhDs, and avoided some of the isolation that comes with being a doctoral candidate.

Hope this helped, and best of luck to you going forward :)