Submitting my first ever research grant application

Hanna Nyborg Støstad (@hannastostad) is a Freelance Science Writer, and is also affiliated with the University of Oslo as a guest researcher. Here, she talks about her first ever experience drafting and submitting a research grant application.

This story was published on April 26, 2018, on Hanna’s blog (available here) and has been republished here with her permission.

This week was the deadline of my first ever real grant application. It’s been pretty hard work, but in a strange way I’ve kind of enjoyed it — 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’ve written a whole bunch of grant proposals (and found that most of them don’t get funded) it gets less fun, but I’m still naive and optimistic! (Well, I’m also a skeptic so I don’t actually expect it to be funded, but I’m hopeful enough to keep the process positive!)

My PhD is about the evolution of bird sperm, but for the grant proposal I wanted to go in a different direction, so I’m going back to what I used to work on previously, which is bird behaviour and ecology. I’ve really enjoyed my PhD work (it’s coming to an end! eek!) but I think I’m an ecologist at heart! Combining evolution and ecology is an ideal scenario for me so I sat down with a paper called “Identification of 100 fundamental ecological questions,” and 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’m 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’t have a lot of relevant contacts.

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’d prefer to be if I’m going abroad) at one of the most prestigious universities and asked if he wanted to collaborate for the proposal. Nothing to lose, right?

Fascinating, right? Want to know how Hanna’s first grant application experience turned out? Read her full story here.