Last month, Science Craft’s trainers brought our Proposal Writing workshop to the Graduierten-Akademie der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena. Over the course of 2 days, Babette and Brian worked together with 12 participants whose backgrounds could not have been more diverse in terms of research discipline, grant-writing experience and nationality.

This workshop allowed us to explore the do’s and don’ts of writing grants and fellowships in a truly multi-disciplinary group including social scientists, mathematicians, chemists and life scientists. We were delighted to have several nationalities represented with participants coming from Pakistan, Romania, Japan, India and Germany. We were also very encouraged to receive extremely positive feedback from a group that included novice grant writers alongside more experienced writers (including an Emmy Noether Fellow).

To tailor the workshop to the diverse research backgrounds of our students we simulated the process of applying for funding from YAFA (“Yet Another Funding Agency”), a fictitious funder with the mission of supporting “high-risk, high-reward research” by encouraging “imaginative cross-disciplinary projects”

On the first day, participants were taught the principles of Proposal Writing. They learned to see the process from the perspective of the funder and to put themselves in the shoes of the reviewer.

On the second day, participants formed small groups and put their knowledge to work. In group work, participants simulated the evaluation process by adopting the roles of primary and secondary reviewers. Each group then took on the role of a research consortium by developing and presenting a selected proposal. In the afternoon, three very different projects competed for funding from YAFA:

ARCHEL – Antireflective coatings for high efficiency lenses
MIFP – Modelling immune system counteracting fungal pathogens
BEER – Tracking the interaction of beer and society

The class voted overwhelmingly to support the ARCHEL project. But before the winning participants could celebrate their success, they were required to negotiate project finances with YAFA. This negotiation replicated the real-world situation where applicants for funding must justify their requested budgets to the funding agency.

Finally, in one-to-one consultations each participant received detailed feedback and language edits for their mini-proposals from both instructors. This feedback addressed proposal structure and content as well as project design and the finer points of language use.

After two productive and competitive days we were delighted that the workshop received an overall score of 9.7 out of 10 in participant feedback. One student commented that it was “the best workshop I ever attended – good mixture of theory, team work and discussion.” Babette and Brian would like to thank all the participants for helping to make this such an enjoyable workshop.

Currently, we are preparing to bring the Proposal Writing workshop to Munich in the New Year. There we will work together with fellows of the TUM Talent Factory and are looking forward to meeting participants in another interdisciplinary group, this time consisting of life scientists, chemists and engineers.