I’ve been in my current job for two years now, and I’ve lost track of the number of grants I’ve worked on.
- I’ve done first drafts, final proofreads, and everything in between.
- I’ve been present from the first planning meeting for some grants, and done little more than handle the assembly and final submission of others.
- I’m learning how best to track the progress of grant-funded projects run by large multidisciplinary teams, and by single distracted clinicians.
Somewhat obviously, I’ve learned the most from the applications and resulting projects in which I’ve been most heavily involved. For the purposes of your amusement this post, I can sum up my findings in the following equation:
I find that tracking the progress of the blue stuff is relatively straightforward, if I’ve been involved in (or at least party to) the PIs’ decisions about how to balance the individual elements of the red stuff1.
The hard part is the reverse engineering.
One of my current projects is to help write detailed in-house specimen collection and processing instructions, as well as an ethics application, for a grant we were recently awarded. The grant was originally submitted before I joined the group, and was revised and resubmitted last year. I was spending most of my time and energy on two other grants submitted to the same competition, and was therefore spared too much involvement in this fairly straightforward resubmission.
So, when I had to come up with a very detailed description of the blue part of the funded project, I only had the first element of the red side of the equation to work from. I have no idea which experiments make up the bottom two categories.
While this has been a somewhat frustrating experience, my reverse engineering efforts have certainly taught me a lot that I didn’t know about grant writing. The primary lesson is the importance of a cleverly constructed budget.
I’m now trying to use this hard-won knowledge in one of my other current projects: drafting the budget and justification for another (five year, six figure) grant application, using only the single line item and sad-face emoticon provided by the PI.
Red stuff, blue stuff, and black holes.
1 the balance is usually sometimes never ever ever influenced by the rigour of the funding body’s financial and scientific progress reporting procedures
Red stuff, blue stuff, and black holes
and hopefully some green money đ
It’s sadly amusing that the hard part of being a scientist doesn’t seem to be the science itself as much as distilling it down to a grant application…
Lovely post.
using only the single line item and sad-face emoticon provided by the PI.
sounds like some kind of miracle to me, I’ll definitely know who to ask next time I have to write a grant.
This is probably going to sounds naive (I’ve only attempted one grant proposal and that was a very small one) but I would have liked some feedback. I know for real grant proposals you get reviewers comments but presumably they only really comment on the science – then there is whether you get it or not, which is also a clue.
Maybe you could start a grant writing school for us postdocs!
Anna, sometimes the red and the blue bags us the green! (Although we’ll accept money of any colour!)
Yes, the art of grant writing is an essential skill these days. It always makes me think of the line from All you need is love, for some reason:
“Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game”
Unfortunately, the next line (“It’s easy”) is less applicable.
Samantha, thanks!
I was given a bit more to go on than just the single line item… although not much!
For early career scientists (and the occasional late career one too, I’m sure), pre-submission feedback on your grants from more experienced PIs is essential. At every stage – at the final draft, it’s often too late. I’m sorry you didn’t get that before submitting your proposal. Does your institution have a grants office? We have a service that will review and comment on grants before submission, but the PIs I work with are usually well established and don’t use it.
I should write a post some day about what makes a good grant. There are already some very comprehensive guides out there, though, which makes me reluctant to invest too much time!
OK, now that I’ve started to think about it, here’s a brief summary:
tailor the application to the funding agency you’re applying to, and explicitly state how your research addresses the aims / mission statement / philosophy of the funding agency and the specific grant competition you’re submitting to.
explicitly state why the research is important and timely (first opportunity to build on new knowledge / apply new techniques (but not just for the sake of the novelty, the new technique has to give you an insight or an efficiency / throughput that wasn’t possible before)
explicitly state why YOU are ideally (and preferably uniquely) qualified to carry out this research – your background, training, techniques you’ve mastered, equipment / resources available to you, unique patient populations etc). If you’re proposing to use brand new techniques, provide evidence that you’ll be able to get it working (proof of principle experiment as part of your preliminary data, or if this isn’t possible, find a collaborator who knows how to do it)
um, I’m sure I’ll think of more later!
My boss helped me with my proposal but I hadn’t thought about a grants office – I will look into that.
Interesting that you suggest getting feedback from other PIs at the early stages and not just for the final draft. Am storing all this information up for a years time when I will probably have to start writing something.
I went on a ‘writing effective grant proposals’ course but it was only a day and pretty basic. The one fun thing was that we had two hours to write a proposal to be assessed by the others in the group, this made the whole process seem less frightening. Also you were allowed to invent things, it’s much easier to write something if you can invent some preliminary data :))
Gaah, parenthesis abuse! What was I thinking? I think I inserted the right number of lefts and rights, but not necessarily in the right places.
Sorry, our posts crossed!
I’ve been on a couple of interesting one day courses, but really, the best way to learn is by writing a few proposals (or by helping a more experienced scientist with one of theirs – my first ever exposure to writing grants (as opposed to fellowship applications) was when my postdoctoral supervisor asked me to contribute a couple of sections to her main operating grant renewal). And I would definitely advise getting feedback on your initial ideas before you start writing them into a full grant proposal.
It’s sadly amusing that the hard part of being a scientist doesn’t seem to be the science itself as much as distilling it down to a grant applicationâŚ
It is sad, but I think Cath’s institute is lucky to have someone like her to help (especially newer) PI’s with this process and in this fashion.
Aww (blushes).
It’s all true, though, obviously đ
I’m meeting more and more people who’ve been hired to do similar jobs to mine (no-one ever has the exact same job description as any other people in the same role, though). I think it’s a growing career niche, as biology gets more and more high through-put and growing teams of specialists (statisticians, bioinformaticians etc) are required to make sense of the data. I was originally hired for two years, and have just been switched to a permanent position (although with a modified job description – more on that in a future post!)