10 Sure-Fire Tips to Help You in Successful Grant Writi...

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10 Sure-Fire Tips to Help You in Successful Grant Writing

Students usually focus on common mistakes when advised by their professor while educating them on grant writing but no such advice is required if you are one of the continuing researchers. They know what to write in a grant proposal to be successful. Some tips collected by me during 20 years of teaching grant writing as a principal investigator, funded by the National Institutes of Health, are provided hereunder to help you in grant writing successfully.

1. Start with writing for small grants: Usually new members of faculty or postdocs try to write for big grants as soon as possible even if they do not have any experience. It will be better for you to write initially for small grants as getting grant funds has become more tricky these days than earlier. Main thing that matters is to start writing for grants at the start of your career and monetizing the advantages as soon as possible.

2. Dream big with the support of your mentor: It is important to imagine about the large grants you can get ultimately, in the beginning of your career. A big grant should be based on 5 goals. By writing for small grants you can start achieving your five goals one and one-by-step-by-step. One of the commonest dangers mistake done by overambitious faculty members is to write for large grants at the initial stage of their career.

3. Go through the record of previously funded people: You can get the record of successful recipients of grants online provided by the grant agencies. You can also approach foundation staff of the grants office of your institution to get that list, if it is not available online. This list will allow you to know the level of support provided by the grant agencies to your field of research. You can ask some of those recipients, if they are willing to share their techniques to write for grants successfully.

4. Spend half of your time on summary and targets: Most of the successful writers of grant applications usually spend half of their time not only on writing the application but also on revising its goals and summary. Your aim should be the first thing impressive while starting to write the application. During the process of writing your grant application it will be important for you to send the rough idea of your draft and aim to your mentor for revision and review as most of the members of grant panel usually read the summary of the application.

5. Do not show your urgency: instead of showing your utmost need for grant you should show that you can manage it otherwise also. Your seniors can be more helpful to you in this regard. So instead of using only the name of your co-investigators you should develop a working relationship with them. It will help the reviewers to know about this collaboration in the initial stage of your studies.

6. Your aims should match with your methods: It means that the methods you include in your grant proposal should match directly to the aims of your studies. You should avoid including methods that do not match to your goals. Usually the researchers in their early career remain tempted to inflate their proposal with contradictory aims and methods to make it more impressive but it makes the proposal average.

7. Use as many tables or figures as you can: These tables and figures can help the reviewer to understand your proposal more quickly and easily as mere text can be boring for them. They can provide important information in limited space. But the figures and tables in each section of your grant application should be relevant to it.

8. Before submitting get it reviewed externally: You may not be able to review your own grant application after writing it as you can miss the errors. So you should ask your colleagues and seniors to review it before submitting it. An external reviewer will review it more effectively even if he knows nothing about your field of research.

9. Keep the reviewers happy: You should us subheadings in your grant proposal so that the reviewers, burdened from the number of applications, can feel happy while reviewing your proposal.

10. Choose an interesting topic: The choice of a wrong topic can not only affect your success in future but also your routine productivity. You can make the reviewers in your favor by selecting a topic you are interested in so that you can make your proposal more effective.
 

Help of external source
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