Monthly Archives: March 2012

Planning Your Time

Hello all – sorry for the radio silence. I was on vacation, and am now in the middle of moving. I am hoping to do at least one detailed weekly post from now on!!

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I was originally going to talk about finding grants, but that will have to wait a week so I can properly address the topic. Instead I am going to talk about something that none of us ever have enough of – TIME!

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When writing grants there are several time elements you need to consider when planning your writing timeline:

1)    When is the grant due to the grant agency?

2)    When is the grant due for internal approval (if needed)?

3)    When are letters of support/collaboration due?

4)    What other large projects do you have coming due?

 

What should happen.

All major granting agencies will suggest you FINISH a grant AT LEAST a month before the deadline. The key reason for this relates to the last topic: The earlier the grant is “done” the more feedback you can get from your colleges/collaborators. In other words, you can take a break from it AND get some editorial and content comments. Both of these things will help strengthen your grant. Taking a break can help you see the grant with fresh eyes. This helps you see any potential errors or edits the grant needs more easily. Having someone else read the grant like they are a reviewer will help you find areas that YOU feel are clear, but might be confusing to someone not so intimately familiar with the topic.

 

What really happens?

We thank the Internet that most agencies allow online submission, and we don’t have to spend the big bucks for overnight FedEx anymore.

Most people don’t have anything vaguely resembling a final product until a week before deadline. This happens mainly because of everything else on your plate getting in your way. If you are a new graduate student, and think you will have more time when you are a post doc or a professor, you are lying to yourself. Right now you have class, research, and probably are a teaching assistant trying to earn some income. In the future, as a post doc, you will be trying to finish publications from your PhD, helping graduate students, conducting research, applying for jobs, etc… Then, as a professor, you will have multiple committee meetings, classes to teach, research to conduct and/or advise students on, journals asking you to review papers, etc…

Therefore, as a graduate student, NOW is the time to learn how to balance your time, and find your ideal working situation. As I mentioned in an earlier post – KNOW YOURSELF!! Figure out what works best for you in terms of getting research and writing done, and do it. I work best under a tight deadline and by working in long stretches. To manage this I do two things: 1) I LIE to myself about the deadline, and 2) I work on everything else like a fiend so I can clear blocks of time to read and write in. The later includes telling people that I will be unavailable for that period of time, unless it is an emergency. The former gives me some flexibility if something unexpected happens, helps me make sure I get any letters of support I need in place on time for the final application (because it is best to submit them with the main application), and keeps me from annoying the higher ups and the office of off campus research (or what ever your university calls it).

Not all grants you submit will have to go through internal review and the office of off campus research. As a rule, large grants that include overhead costs, including all NSF (except pre-doctoral) and NIH, require internal processing so the University will get their due. This often means getting signatures from the department chair and dean, and other paper work. The office of off campus research will actually submit the grant in these case, and often ask for at least 5 business days to process the grant. Most new graduate students don’t have to deal with this level of submission, and can directly submit their grants to grant agencies. Nevertheless, it is good to start learning the system, so you can tell when you can direct submit and when the university needs to submit the grant.

In a later post I will discuss this process more.

Editing Blindness

I will touch on a number of editing topics as time goes on, but I wanted to start with discussing editing blindness and the advantages of having someone else read your writing.

Editing blindness refers to the inability to see certain typos or grammar issues within your own writing. I often find this is true of even the most seasoned editors. This happens for a number of reasons. These are just a few:

  • Word processor editing. We all know the ‘helpful’ little red and green squiggly lines and autocorrect. However, we also know that the people who put together the dictionary did not have an eye towards science or many technical words.
  • Mental Autocorrect/Autocompletion. Often times this occurs because you are so familiar with the material, and you know what you MEANT to write, that your brain corrects for errors.

The first is an issue, because often times when you scan the technical words it will look correct. It is a pain because you often have to “add” words every time you use them – capital and lowercase – in a new document. I have yet to find a complete solution, but one is to customize your dictionary! You can do this by making your own, or importing one someone else has already made. The instructions on how to do this can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322198 . To find a custom dictionary, Google custom dictionary and your field, for example this medical based one, http://bit.ly/bv059x . If you are writing an empirical or review paper you need to make sure you have your dictionary set to the proper language. In other words, most journals published in Britain prefer you use the British spellings for words. So make sure you color or colour in the lines.

The second issue occurs to everyone at some point in time. I especially have an issue with this because I have dyslexia, and my brain has an especially hard time catching errors in my own writing. I have learned to work around my dyslexia, but I still see errors in other people’s writing better than my own. The most editing errors occur in the first writing draft. This is expected, especially if you are free writing (I’ll talk about this later), so make sure you don’t try to pass off a first draft as a final.

I have two suggestions for editing:

1) Have someone else read your writing. Everyone should have someone else read his or her writing to check for typos and clarity. One of the best ways is to have a friend that you trade the favor with. Don’t be shy about asking! I promise both of you will learn from the experience. In addition, if you are writing a grant have at least one person outside your field read the grant. This might seem odd, but remember that most people on the review panel aren’t experts in your field. Therefore, you want to make sure it is straightforward enough for any educated person could follow what you present.

2) Read your paper backwards, one line at a time. This might seem obnoxiously tedious, but I promise it will help you find grammar and typo problems quickly. This was a suggestion I picked up when I was an undergraduate, but forgot about for a long time. I find when I take the time to employ this technique, I catch a lot of typos I was blind to before.

Overall, I learned the most about writing and editing from reading student papers, and from trading editing help with my peers. I learned the least about writing from my graduate advisors. Some were helpful, but most would just say, “Fix typos” or hand back something with vague comments. You might think that is better than getting back something dripping in red, but honestly working through the red ink is one of the best ways to learn and lessen the amount of red you see next time. (I also found students respond better to comments if you make them in green or purple, so consider giving your advisor a gift of pens).

 

P.S. Don’t edit when tired like I just did on this post!!! :)

Know Your Topic, Know Yourself

To kick things off I thought I would discuss something that has been on my mind lately. I have bounced around fields and labs a bit, and most recently the focus of the research I write about took a pretty dramatic shift. This happened because I was primarily hired to write grants, not do research, but that is a story for another time.

The key thing here is that the change demanded I push my learning curve on a new topic, but it caused me to reflect on what it is like to be dropped into a new environment with a new subject matter. If you are in the early stages of your graduate career, or maybe a new postdoc, you know I am talking about. About now you have the feeling of going from the ‘know-it-all’ to the dunce staring at Mt. Improbable. THEN, while you are trying to figure out how to start your climb, your boss/advisor tells you to produce some document (e.g., grant or prospectus) ASAP.

The temptation here will be just to plow into it, and somehow churn something out by skimming some review articles and hope no one notices there is no depth to your statements. STOP! What I want you to do is to take a step back, and realize the mountain isn’t as big as it looks. If you do this you will realize that there is a paper trail for you to follow. My advice here is to take the time to really get to know your topic, and know yourself BEFORE you start to write.

Ok, right now you are probably thinking, “Well, DUH!” especially if you have been in science long at all. However, I think that even seasoned professors tend to forget this process, and often fail to pass this knowledge on to graduate students in the pursuit of something new and shiny.

So what do I mean?

1) Really know your topic –

  • In other words, don’t just read the most recent paper or review. DIG! Use current papers to make a paper trail back to where the field or idea started, and even why it started (if possible). This often means ignoring the first author – sorry person who most likely did the project and writing – and see who was the brains behind the project. This is often the last author, and this person was once inspired by, and worked in, this line of research when they were a student or postdoc in another lab. Go find that lab and the lab that person came from. Rise and repeat.
  • Find your niche, this should stem from the above process. Even if you came in on a “in progress” project, it helps to know where the gaps or assumptions in knowledge are in the field. This makes you better able to address WHY this research needs to be done (and will help you SELL your research!). It is important not to just blindly follow what everyone says, because often when you look closer you will find that what is presented as fact isn’t actually known, hasn’t been tested, or was misinterpreted by someone who didn’t DIG.

2) Know yourself – This is two fold.

  • First, you need to know what really excites you. If you aren’t excited about the research you are doing you won’t be able to get a grant reviewer excited ( a VERY bad thing). Getting to know your topic and learning WHY the research SHOULD help with this. It will also make you look good to your advisor and committee, because knowing and being excited about your research shows you care and are critically thinking about your research (Not that I’m saying you should be Richard Simmons excited when you talk to them, but show some passion).
  • Second, know your work style. I CANNOT give real advice on the ideal work style, because I am a firm believer that everyone has his or her own process. Do know your process and embrace it. If it means lying to yourself about deadlines – DO IT. If it means becoming a vampire or an early bird – DO IT. If it means budgeting money to sit in a coffee house all day – DO IT.  It took me a long time to realize that the more the fight your process to fit someone else’s ideal the less productive you’ll be. In a later post I will address this issues more in depth and provide some resources that makes suggestions on how to establish a “better” process, or how to fully embrace the one you have.

What Academic Panhandling is about!

Welcome to Academic Panhandling. I started this blog in response to the urging and demands of my friends in various stages of their science and engineering academic careers. What I am going to present here is advice on finding and writing grants for all stages of academics. I especially look to help graduate students and early stage post docs who are new to the idea of granting for their supper.

In general, this blog will be geared towards scientists (especially the med/health and life science crowd), but I hope anyone writing grants can benefit from this blog. I have worked with psychology and engineering students, and I have found that the basic writing principles I’ll discuss here can help almost anyone. While this is primarily a grant writing blog, it is really about improving and focusing writing overall. Therefore, a lot of the writing topics presented here should be easily translatable to other writing.

Ok. So you are now probably thinking, “Why should I trust this person? What are their qualifications?”. The primary answer is that I’ve walked the long booby-trapped road of science writing and granting. I am not claiming to have learned it all, or that I have perfected the craft. However, I really hope I can help shorten the journey and clarify the road signs for others. My main research and writing experience is in neuroscience, endocrinology, physiology, and pharmacology. In terms of writing, I have published peer reviewed empirical and review papers, as well as book chapters. I have written all sorts of grants: small institutional, area specific, state based, and various levels of national (e.g. small to full on NSF and NIH grants). I was successful enough that I funded my own research for 4 years, supplemented travel and research money from my advisors the other years, and helped fund the entire lab.

I NEVER thought I would trade in my lab coat or field boots for a word processor, but my life took several unexpected turns which have lead me to this point. I hope I can help demystify and ease the learning curve of granting for you. In the process I look forward to learning from all of you as well!