Grant Writing Webinar & More To Come
I am jumping off the webinar cliff in the next week or two. Since I used to teach general biology for majors among other classes, I should know something about giving presentation to large and small groups. On July 10 or thereabouts, I am joining forces with Stefanie Robel of Stefanie Robel Consulting as a guest and co-presenter on our joint topic of storytelling for scientists:
How to Get Research Grants Funded and Give Killer Scientific Talks.
Stefanie is originally from Germany and has a unique perspective on scientific presentations. Subscribe to my newsletter for updates about the webinar, more trainings, and other services. Watch for more updates here at The Grant Science Lab, on twitter @grantsciencelab , @DeborahCook6 and Facebook. Please respond to my short survey on Academic Consulting Services, so I may better serve the needs of academic scientists with grant proposal preparation and career goals.
Myths of the Colleague Proposal Review
A frequent piece of advice in academic science is to have someone else read your grant proposal before submission. That advice usually means having a colleague review your grant proposal. Another pair of scientifically literate eyes can determine whether your ideas engage the reader and tell a good research story. An extra pair of eyes can also find grammatical, spelling, and syntax errors.
Grant writing and reviewing groups are advantages within research associations and collaborations where this kind of collegial review occurs for a few lucky scientists. The rest of the research community is mostly on its own. Most faculty members are on their own because they are just as busy as their mythic colleague with the duties of teaching, research, and service. Likely, nobody has the time required for a deep review of a proposal that isn’t theirs. The mythic colleague doesn’t have time for significant mentoring through the grant proposal process either.
Some Thoughts About Academic and Scientific Grants
Grant consulting is hard work. I am fortunate to belong to the Grant Professionals Association. It is a great group and I’ve found some great colleagues. Scientist members are pretty rare within the organization, but there are large higher education and health care special interest groups. Once I got more involved with the local chapter and then attended the national convention, I was stunned to realize how much I knew about grants just from preparing NSF and similar proposals. This past January, I was the invited guest for #grantchat on Twitter. Here is a link to the Storify archive of that chat. There is more at grantchat.org.