Writing a grant application as a PhD student; reflections, advice, and grievances

How not to write a grant application, courtesy of It’s Always Sunny; “Give me money. Money me. Money now. Me a money needing a lot now.”

note 1; an early version of this post appears on my blog here.

note 2; this is a long post. Grab a drink, settle in. If you dont have the time save it for later, possibly with beer.

In May 2017, I submitted a grant application to the ESRC with my DPhil supervisor. It was an uphill struggle from the beginning, and the last week was a flurry of activity between my supervisor and I to make the revisions that were much needed to polish the application. At the time of writing the last version of this post, I was waiting with my fingers crossed that “our efforts will not succumb to the ~90% likelihood that we will not receive funding”, or more positively, that our application would be successful. The application was moved from our intended grant application review meeting around July, to one in November. This clearly spoiled my plans of hopefully starting with the project in October. In the end, things worked out with a postdoc position in the mean time. To be honest, by the time December hit, I wasn’t even considering the possibility that the application would have been approved. So, when I got a phone call to let me know that we have the grant I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. I’m very happy that the application was successful, and am also excited to start the project.

seriously, please can I have money?

Now that the process is almost complete I have had some more reflections on the grant writing process, in particular from the perspective of a PhD student (let’s call me a junior researcher, even though I hate the phrase). Hopefully, some of my reflections may be useful considerations for other PhDs thinking of applying for research grants and plausibly for fellowships. Of course, we did not apply for a fellowship and there are huge differences that will be apparent later. However, there may be some helpful cross overs.

This is not my own cocky version of “how to write a successful grant application as a PhD student”. I have no illusions that a huge degree of luck involved at every stage of the process and that lots of (perhaps more) deserving applications for the same call did not receive funding. I also think that it is a disservice to every other applicant (and researcher) to assume that our application, our idea, was simply “better” than others or had some intrinsic quality that made it more fund-able. It would be easy to slip into survivor bias and write some inspirational cliche about how it was worth the time and stress, because for many more it was not. This is an open invite; if I ever try to give advice that reeks of survivorship bias, call me on it. Screaming at me or hitting me with sticks works for this purpose.

xkcd once more, for the win. Please don’t be “this guy”

On the flip side, I should also be able to comment on and complain about the stresses that come with grant writing as a junior researcher. Just because we got the grant, doesn't mean that the process was as harrowing as it was educational.

You will lose months off your PhD

Seriously, even writing the first draft will eat your time like a hungry hungry hippo swallows marbles.

PhDs are time poor, so adding extra work on top of the purely-PhD related tasks and be a burden. I had three years funding from a studentship. When that time was up I had to be starting the next position in order to continue doing important things like paying bills. Suffice to say that there was pressure to not only complete the application to have a chance at postdoctoral funding, but also to not lose too much time in the process so that I could actually get the DPhil finished in the first place. I was extremely lucky to be working on some side projects that were funded, and securing a postdoc that will bridge the gap between finishing the studentship, and finishing my DPhil, on to starting our grant project. Without these lucky breaks, I don’t know how I could have made ends meet.

Anyway, onto writing the grant application itself.

I think that I sunk about 3 months of solid work into the grant application. I don’t mean that it took 3 months, the time from me starting to write and submission was about 6 months. I mean that 3 solid months of time was spent on the grant application alone. Here’s a quick breakdown

• I estimate that I spent a solid 2 months of my DPhil time to put together the first completed draft of the entire grant. This was early 2017.
• Then add in the research I put into how to write a grant, which funders to look into (and submission dates that would work to get funding at the ‘right’ time), the equipment we would need (including quotes for costings, which was time-consuming). This took about a month or two in 2016, but I was also working on my actual DPhil work too.
• after completing the first draft in late Febuary, we had several rounds of heavy revisions to the main documents before submitting in May. One of these revisions was particularly heavy and raised the question of whether we would be able to even submit on our intended deadline. I then spent the next few weeks were solid working on the grant to complete these revisions, including ignoring my wife and working quite a few evenings.

Part of this is because your grant application is not “just” a project proposal. You will also need to write about; data management, ethical considerations, impact assessments and plans, justifying staff and equipment, user involvement, other costs, and so on at the very least.

In short, while the process will differ for everybody, writing a grant application will take months of dedicated work.

Grant writing in a GIF. I’m really trying to be positive, honest.

There will be setbacks and delays

For me, a setback was changing our targeted research council. Looking back (even before getting the decision letter) it was certainly the right call, but at the time I had to do quite a bit of rethinking and restructuring — including the loss of two pages of space from the Case for Support (essentially the background and research plan). For others it might be illness, or changes of deadlines, receiving feedback, or co-applicants disagreements over the application, to name only a few. We had several rounds of massive revisions that ate way more time than I expected, and we were so close to missing the deadline. It took time, determination, and some persistence in convincing my supervisor that we could manage it.

We had one more set back. In the end, despite driving the application to submission in time to be included in the July meeting, it was assessed in the November meeting. This was frustrating, as it defeated part of the point of all the stress in the first place of getting it submitted ‘on time’. It is also another example of the kind of setbacks that can occur when you have done everything in your power. It may have been that reviewers comments were not received in time for another deadline, it may have been that there were simply too many applications to assess and ours was pushed back, it may even have been because we needed to clarify some costings and that pushed us back.

Given the time-course of a grant application, you should expect;

• There is likely to be at least one major delay, as there could be in any project. Plan for this; best case scenario is that you have no setbacks and you can submit early.
• You will lose a week or so before the end of the final deadline, as the application will have to be submitted to your research institution / department. To illustrate, our deadline was the 31st and we had to submit on the 24th.
• On that note, get in touch with your finances or grant administrators as early as possible, they are awesome and like gold dust to you throughout the entire process.

It’s going to cost a hell of a lot more than you think

Speaking of money, get some input from your research funding manager early on in the planning stages. If the grant has a fixed limit, then this is particularly important, because just paying your own salary will eat the budget like you would not believe.

Why? Indirect costs.

I’m far from an expert in the full economic costs of grant funding. But, for what it’s worth, you will need to budget for the full costs associated with any post. Pension contribution, estates costs, definition costs/contributions, are just a few. Some will come under “Indirect costs” which I am yet to find a specific definition of. Again, contact your research funding manager with some estimations of the staffing needed for the project and they will help. It will change from institution to institution, but for us the indirect costs and estates costs combined were around half of the total amount we applied for.

Half of the money we applied for. Half.

This was a shock to me, so hopefully it will be less of a shock to you.

Also on a related point, if you’re applying for equipment costs then your university might have to put forward half of the money for that. You will want to have an agreement from the appropriate persons (probably your department head) to provide these funds. Again, ask for feedback early.

Take help wherever you can

I was lucky enough to have a postdoc and another PhD in my lab read through and comment on the application. My wife also acted as a non-expert to offer some commentary on the documents, especially the read-ability. Each little bit of feedback is useful in some way, so use it. The comments that I found particularly helpful related to the flow of the application. Things that were clear to me were not clear in the writing. Maybe I assumed some prior knowledge. This is common. I feel, when you have spent so much time on a document that it blends into a single entity, rather than what should be a concise and flowing train of thought. Your application will be read by non-experts in your field, so assume that they know nothing about the research your proposal is based on.

On a related note, the research councils have a ton of resources to use and the JeS has its own summaries of what is entailed in each section. What is extremely useful are other’s applications, although whether they will be shared is another issue. Use these resources, they are vital in understanding what is expected in each section.

Probably the most useful advice I can give is this; use any resource that you can. Here are ones that I found very useful, and helped with writing the proposal massively. Warning; lots of links (if you have more, let me know and I’ll add them).

• any grant funding seminars or training sessions at your university. If they don’t have one, then contact your research grants admin team for advice. Also, google it to death. There are hordes of resources out there with a mix of overly generic advice, to specific advice for individual grant calls.
• Professor Masud Husain wrote a paper on writing successful grant or fellowship applications. I’ve been told that he always gets the grants he applies for. Whether that is accurate or not, I am unsure. Importantly, it’s filled with useful points. Read it, absorb.
• if you can find them, find previous applications to the same granting agencies. I found a few ESRC Future Research Leaders proposals online (here and here), and amazingly, they included the reviewers comments.
• scrape the webpage of your intended funding body for relevant information. What are their funding goals? How will they judge your application? What are their strategic aims (obviously trying to meet these can only be beneficial)? The ESRC has loads of resources for this, including a research funding guide. Also, my favourite, the guidance for applicants document. This one details what information should be provided in each section of the application. It is awesomely useful. The ESRC also has call spec, and FAQ, both are useful.
• Je-S. For UK research councils, you’ll apply through the Joint Electronic Submissions system. On the help/handbook page, they provide details for most of the funding types and the sections that go into the grant applications they manage, and how to complete these sections. Look under the “Standard proposals” section to get summaries of pretty much every section that you need to write for your application. The page also includes links to specific research councils’ funding guides, copied here; AHRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, NC3Rs, STFC.
• Ask others to read it. Whether they are; non-academics, your peers, or senior academics with a strong record of obtaining funding, they all can offer useful feedback that can be helpful in making the proposal clearer.

Co-applicant or named researcher?

This was the worst part of applying for this grant. It still angers me. I have tried to keep this post positive and helpful so far, but this still aggravates me and for all my trying and rationalising, I cant get past that. So if you’re adverse to swearing, skip this section. I had originally wrote a much more negative version of this post last year entitled “Co-applicant or named researcher; someone else decides”. I left this point until last because it was for me the worst part of the whole experience, and I would not be surprised if I continue to bear a grudge against this particular decision made by my department.

The short version; I was not authorised to be a co-applicant on the grant that I wrote. I am a named researcher, so I have a job. But, the grant is entirely in my supervisor’s name.

The full story; In order to be an applicant on a research grant on Je-S, you need an account of a certain type. This is authorised by your institution. As I am not a senior academic nor did I have previous grant funding, I had to “apply” for an account. Fine, fill in some forms, obviously given that I wrote the damn thing I’ll be a co-applicant, Right.

Wrong. I had an automated message from Je-S to say that my request for the account had been denied. It read,

Thank you for applying for a Verified account for the Je-S System. However your request has been declined by your Research Organisation for the reasons given below:

Department confirmed a Registered account is not applicable.

That was it, a blank “fuck you, go away plebeian” from an automated system. Did I get any other input, did I fuck. So, I contacted our head of department about the decision to figure out why. Had I done something wrong? Is there something that can be done to ensure that I would actually get credit for the work I had put in?

Can you guess the reasons why? I’ll give you three tries.

Is it because I hadn’t completed my doctorate yet. Bingo.

Is it because I didn't have a strong publication track record. You betcha.

In short, is it because I was too junior? Damn fucking straight.

I mean, the email was nice and everything. But the idea that including my name as a co-applicant would push the limits on research councils wanting to promote early career researchers stung like a slap in the face. I had put in months of work to essentially be told that I would get zero credit, even under the low odds of it being a successful application. Sure it can be included in references, but is that the same as being able to say that I was a co-applicant on the grant, somehow I doubt it.

I tried to rationalise this as perhaps including my name as a co-applicant would hinder our chances of success. Although it wasn't stated explicitly, it’s easily read that rationale between the lines. Maybe if that’s true then it would be better for me to not be a co-applicant in order to maximise the chances of success. Is that success though? Isn’t that just a clear indication of a broken system that doesn’t value the contributions of all involved, however junior?.

I’d still have a research position doing work I am interested in, I reasoned to myself in an attempt to feel better about it. In an attempt to suck it up and get on with finishing the application. Sometimes it helped, sometimes I just felt unsupported, betrayed.

I had hoped that the fact that I had led the application across all stages might hold sway over my publication count, but sadly not. Maybe I was too naive, too junior, in my expectations.

Even after submitting my thesis, I’m not sure that I feel any less “junior”

So, by necessity due to the sunk cost of having written the complete application and being mid way through revisions, and still needing this extra small chance of obtaining a postdoc research post, I continued working on the application. Although I would not be receiving full credit (while fully acknowledging the unlikeliness of receiving the funding in any case ) I needed to continue to take the lead and work on the proposal. If I had allowed myself the opportunity to slow down for more than a brief period of venting frustrations then the application would not have been completed.

You know what didn't help, each time I began revising a different document I had to erase my name from the applicant header. A reminder every few days that for all my efforts I was too junior, too risky, somehow not good enough. I also reflected on this in my post on impostor syndrome.

I’m not sure if there is a lesson to pass on here. Hopefully it’s just an experience that can highlight the difficulties of an early career researcher trying to get a handle on academia and pursuing a research career. I did learn that you might not always get the full credit for your efforts, that it is possible to struggle on and try to push this to the back of your mind.

More than anything, I learned that being junior sucks. It has strengthened my resolve to ensure that when (if) I do get to a position in which I have any power to support ECRs, that I do everything possible to help them, to give them the support that they deserve.

Writing a research grant application as a PhD

It’s hard work. It is long, frustrating, and sometimes rage-inducingly tedious. In the back of your mind there will always be that niggling doubt, not just in yourself; is it the right project? am I writing this section correctly? is this enough information? how the hell can I fit this all into 6 pages? Worst, there is the understanding that it is months of work for only a small chance at gaining the funding. But, it is an essential skill to develop as an academic. Perhaps not as early as in your third year of a PhD, but I’ve always believed in developing skills early — ideally before they are actually needed.

Thanks for sticking with me, I hope that some of these reflections are helpful. At the very least there are plenty of links to look elsewhere. Grant writing is draining work, with a low success rate. The more information out there, especially about what it’s actually like to write these things, the better. If you have any other points, contact me and I’ll include them. Lets build a conversation about ECR experiences to see how we can make things better, and more supportive. In this kind of soul-draining academic job market, we all need all the support we can get.

I’ve grown fond of the saying (in my own words) “academia, and grant writing in particular, is like a pie eating contest in which the prize is more pie”. Please give me some more pie, forever more pie.