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Writing Grant Applications
- jseliger 7y agoIt is very hard for most people to write effectively, unless they've dedicated conscious effort to learning to do so. We've worked with brilliant scientific and technical people who do not communicate their ideas well: https://seliger.com/2017/03/28/write-scientific-technical-grant-proposals/ https://seliger.com/2017/03/28/write-scientific-technical-gr.... This: https://seliger.com/2017/08/21/grant-writing-help-series-put-important-thing-first-sentence/ https://seliger.com/2017/08/21/grant-writing-help-series-put... is about one example of effective non-fiction persuasive writing like scientific and technical grants: "Put the most important thing in the first sentence." By the way, the whole Dave Barry interview is worth reading: https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-dave-barry-books-blog-quotes-5ba317949bd8 https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-dave..., although most of it doesn't seem to be immediately on topic.
- sdrothrock 7y ago> We've worked with brilliant scientific and technical people who do not communicate their ideas well Alan Alda did as well and that was what gave birth to the idea for his book, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look On My Face? (https://www.amazon.com/Understood-Would-Have-This-Look-ebook/dp/B01M61KNLW https://www.amazon.com/Understood-Would-Have-This-Look-ebook...) It has a big focus on improv that can be distracting from the main message of the book, but I found it really insightful and had my assistant read it for discussion about how to improve communication skills and awareness.
- mindfulhack 7y agoI'm a successful full-time professional grantwriter. There are about 100 tricks in the book for standing out from the pack, though not all apply to all categories or instances of grants. But no matter what type of grant it is, the biggest point I tell people is this: You need a story. All other aspects flow from that. (E.g. how effectively you can communicate the flow of logic in the writing, and other technical aspects which include much more than just the text boxes and what this blog summarily describes.) Find that story, then it will rise above the pack. Most people want grant money but have no idea what it takes to get it.
- WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 7y agoReminds me of academic papers. When I first started in academia I thought it was all about merit, results, and following a proper scientific process. Turns out if you want to be successful, as measured by paper acceptances or citations, which is the standard metric used by universities and companies, it's all about being able to tell a good story to convince reviewers. A well-told and convincing story can hide all kind of faults in your experiments or results. It's pretty much all you need.
- bonoboTP 7y agoWhen I started my PhD, I was quite surprised with everyone at the lab always talking about their "storyline" for their upcoming paper. It really is very important.
- gradstudent 7y agoHaving a good story isn't about hiding the faults in your work, it's about making your work accessible to others. It's no good having tons of experiments if you can't explain what they mean and why anyone else should care.
- joshspankit 7y agoYou’ve assumed the end goal of having the work be accessible. The person you’re replying to has a different goal of paper acceptances or citations.
- skummetmaelk 7y agoWhile that is true, the problem is that bad science is easily masked by telling a good story. When telling the story is more important than the science itself, you end up with more and more extravagant projects that always end in failure to achieve anything close to what was written in the grant application.
- gentleman11 7y agoIndy video games developers: what should they do to stand out?
- ISL 7y agoThis is missing a key ingredient. Call the Program Officer and figure out what they want. If what you want to do doesn't align with what they're trying to achieve with the program, you will never get meaningful funding. Your project need not align exactly, but it must support the cause of the program, otherwise it is dead in the water, no matter how well-written. Good Program Officers are happy to communicate with PIs, and will help them make great applications. You need them, and they need you. Build that team. Do it early and often.
- Fomite 7y agoNote that this will vary greatly by funding agency and the specific call. For example, the NSF can do a degree of steering, etc. The CDC, depending on program, has either full control, or absolutely none at all.
- wiggler00m 7y agoApplying for grants is a giant waste of time for most startups (opinion, obviously, some exceptions).
- 6510 7y agoI've had countless ideas, most bad, some good, some fantastic. Quite often there is someone to be found who already had it and worked at horribly, reasonably or in an awe inspiring way. A few years ago an idea of mine evolved into something spectacular (while still remaining just an idea) it was original and I now consider it the best idea in the history of humanity. The best part is that humanity [in its snail like progress] is also ready for it.
- azhenley 7y agoThe grant process is terrible. I’m a second year professor in the US and wish I had known how terrible this process is years ago. Even though my first federal grant (NSF) was funded, the process was one of the most draining things I have ever done. I loved the puzzle of breaking down a new, fun idea into its fundamental parts and I enjoy writing. But I do not enjoy the salesmanship, the 7% funding rate, the 8 months I waited to find out my second proposal was rejected, or the laborious amounts of supplemental documents.
- acollins1331 7y agoYou can whine all you want, but the other option is not being in control of your own project and answering to someone else who is paying you. Grant writing sucks, but you control your funds and how it's spent and what it's used for. There's a reason it's hard to get hundreds of thousands of dollars from people, and it's because you can basically spend it how you want. So of course they're going to make sure you know what the hell you're doing.
- forgingahead 7y agoGrant applications are generally a waste of time, akin to writing a mini-thesis just so you have the opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Grant awarding is also incredibly opaque, and generally very biased to the reviewers (ie, corrupt), with random variables playing a part in decision making that have no bearing on the actual capabilities of the grant-writers. Worse, reviewers and grant-makers themselves are generally unqualified to make such grants, and as such, have no ability nor incentive to track the success of grants issued. All in all, if you need money in academia, your best bet is to either be independently wealthy to fund your ideas, or find a few direct personal benefactors who believe in you and your general goals. *Edit -- if you are here in HN, then your ability to do the latter suggestion (find a few personal benefactors) is actually much more within reach than getting funded through a grant -- it is certainly worth your time to explore that option, and in the long-run will provide you more security and freedom to really explore your field and interests.
- jonathanstrange 7y agoAs someone who has successfully obtained various grants, I wouldn't say they are a waste of time, but I agree that it's essentially a reviewer lottery among the good to excellent applications. At least that's the case in the humanities where evaluation is more subjective anyway. I've had more or less the same application fail miserably in one call and succeed immediately in another, for instance. The problem with grants is that each one of them has their own evaluation criteria, panels, and overall decision structure, so what works for one type of grant is useless with another. That makes writing them so time consuming.
- sgt101 7y agoI have reviewed for a handful of organisations. My learning is that different orgs and funding programs need different emphasis. H2020 is all process and consortium, Epsrc is project and ambition.
- wsxcde 7y agoThis is practical advice, but it also points to the reality of scientific funding today -- you can only get money to do things that you already know how to do. You must have an idea that is pretty much ready to go on day one. All that should remain are working out the details. I can see why bureaucrats and government officials prefer it this way (accountability!) but I don't understand why we scientists put up with it.
- bonoboTP 7y agoIt stuck with me what a famous Hungarian ethologist (Csányi) said in a radio interview recently: you propose the things that you already discovered in the grant application and then use the money to discover new stuff. He generally had a grim view of academia and is senior enough to afford to speak his mind.
- wsxcde 7y agoI actually think it's not as bad as some make it out to be, provided grants are funded at a reasonable rate. What's changed over the last couple of decades or so is that funding rates are single digit percentages. This is the real problem. My advisor said that when he was a younger researcher, it wasn't quite so hard to get funding so he had more time to pursue independent ideas. Even as a much younger researcher, I feel that at any point in time, I usually have a couple of worthwhile new ideas that are quite likely to pan out and will get funded someplace or another. But if I have to spend a multiple months of effort into getting them funded, I have a lot less time available to generate the next couple of good ideas. This doesn't mean that people just stop doing research, most researchers are competitive workaholics. Instead, we'll just rehash the same old stuff in a new bottle: we target newer applications and/or chase the latest fads (e.g. adversarial ML) with the goal of getting some of our old ideas reused in a new domain. This creates a negative feedback loop because the quality of research gets worse and the people think this stuff is not worth funding and that in turn reduces funding rates even lower which causes research to get worse. Unfortunately, scientists working on "useless" ideas wasting public money is a much too convenient bogeyman for politicians to give up.
- Tade0 7y agoA friend of mine was in the M87 imaging team. He's a brilliant scientist, but more importantly he learned how to write effective grant applications early on. He might have not gotten this far without this skill.
- alpineidyll3 7y agoProtip: unless you are already deeply embedded in your field of reviewers having cultivated years of reputation and circular nepotism, you're better off getting a real job to fund your research. Grants are a circle jerk.
- bertr4nd 7y agoSomething I like about This advice is that it puts the research idea at the center of the writing. Too often these sort of recommendations don’t seem to even acknowledge that “having a worthwhile idea” is important, and make it sound like getting a grant/paper is mostly a matter of writing tricks.