{"id":2326,"date":"2019-03-13T07:02:51","date_gmt":"2019-03-13T07:02:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/submitting-my-first-ever-research-grant-application\/"},"modified":"2025-01-15T06:37:07","modified_gmt":"2025-01-15T06:37:07","slug":"submitting-my-first-ever-research-grant-application","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/submitting-my-first-ever-research-grant-application","title":{"rendered":"Submitting my first ever research grant application"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week was the deadline of my first ever real grant application. It\u2019s been pretty hard work, but in a strange way I\u2019ve kind of enjoyed it \u2013 I love writing, so being able to use lots of fancy words has been nice! I get the impression from my senior colleagues that by the time you\u2019ve written a whole bunch of grant proposals (and found that most of them don\u2019t get funded) it gets less fun, but I\u2019m still naive and optimistic! (Well, I\u2019m also a skeptic so I don\u2019t actually expect it to be funded, but I\u2019m hopeful enough to keep the process positive!)<\/p>\n

My PhD is about the evolution of bird sperm, but for the grant proposal I wanted to go in a different direction, so I\u2019m going back to what I used to work on previously, which is bird behaviour and ecology. I\u2019ve really enjoyed my PhD work (it\u2019s coming to an end! eek!) but I think I\u2019m an ecologist at heart! Combining evolution and ecology is an ideal scenario for me so I sat down with a paper called\u00a0\u201cIdentification of 100 fundamental ecological questions,\u201d\u00a0and thought of what kind of questions I would really like to answer. I found that I was most interested in the topics that involved the responses of animals to environmental change, especially behavioural responses. Ok cool, then I just needed someone to work with. For the mobility grant I\u2019m applying for, you need to spend two years at an institution abroad, and since I was going away from the core topic of my PhD I didn\u2019t have a lot of relevant contacts.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

So I thought, why not aim high? I put my brave face on and approached one of the most accomplished ecologists in the UK (which is the place I\u2019d prefer to be if\u00a0 I\u2019m going abroad) at one of the most prestigious universities and asked if he wanted to collaborate for the proposal. Nothing to lose, right? To my delight he was really enthusiastic and even got his partner into the project (she works on bird evolution). Together we worked out some ideas for hypotheses that we could test and an appropriate study system and eventually it shaped up to look something like a doable 3-year project. Then I sat down and wrote it all down, with very frequent use of the Thesaurus (\u201cvery much?\u201d\u00a0Nooo, try \u201cconsiderably\u201d) and drawing on all the fluff they taught me in those tacky CV-writing courses during my UK degree. This application was very much about my own skills and experiences, and it seems like Norwegians are much more unwilling (or unused to) writing good stuff about themselves than English people, and so I think it\u2019s an advantage for me that I\u2019ve been through the UK system. However I think I got rather carried away, as my Norwegian supervisor did tell me to tone it down a little bit! Ha, whoops!\u00a0The highlight however was getting feedback from both the Oxford profs who were both \u201creally impressed\u201d with my proposal draft! Going to live on that for a while!<\/p>\n

Now it\u2019s all submitted and so I can only cross fingers and hope for the best. We don\u2019t get responses until November\/December so I\u2019ll just have to plan as if I don\u2019t get the money and then it\u2019ll be a pleasant surprise if I do. In the meantime, I\u2019ve got to get back to business \u2013 apparently I\u2019ve got this PhD thingy that I need to finish!? To be honest it\u2019s really rather anticlimactic after such a clear deadline to be back to the day-to-day PhD work, but luckily my contract deadline is coming up in not too long\u2026 Best get back to work! Actually, I\u2019ve got some really good work to do since my main PhD article got major (but not impossible) revisions in a big journal, so that\u2019s very exciting! Hopefully you\u2019ll see it published soon!<\/p>\n

Also, I\u2019m lucky enough to have several awesome animals in my life, couldn\u2019t do without that! Especially my young horse Topper who requires all my attention when I\u2019m there and always takes my mind off everything else. I\u2019m 100% sure I do much better science (and avoid mental health problems!) when I get to refuel out in nature with them in between work sessions! Bring on summer and long sunny evenings!<\/p>\n

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Feel free to follow me on Instagram\u00a0@hannastostad<\/a>\u00a0for regular updates that are sometimes sciencey but mostly involves my horse!<\/p>\n