Just after lunchtime on the 26th of October the Research Support Office (RSO) of Umeå University hosted a webinar on the “Do’s and Don’ts” when applying for the upcoming VR grants in March/April 2022. Writing an application for a starting or research project grants can be a daunting experience. You may ask yourself; “Where do I start? How should I write it or how much about what?”, which are all valid questions that you may be able to answer after gaining years of writing experience. However, we don’t have years to spend trying to write a good application. Thankfully, Jeanette Bröms and Anders Wennström, of the RSO, gave an exhaustive presentation on how to go about putting together a grant proposal that will have a high chance of being funded. Among others, some their suggestions were stating a clear problem that is important to address, reachable goals, why it should be you who addresses it, and so much more.
As a special treat we had a guest appearance by Prof. Marie Norgren, from the Clinical Microbiology department, who is the chair of one of the VR Review panels for the medical grants. Prof. Norgren spoke about her experiences being on the panel that decides, which proposal gets funded and which one doesn’t and gave a lot of insights into mistakes reviewers come across in application time and time again. This was a great opportunity to get an insight into the decision-making process and to try to get a feeling/understanding of how reviewers go about evaluating proposals.
If you haven’t had the chance to join this time, fear not – the RSO hosts these kinds of webinars regularly throughout the year. In addition, you can have a look at the slides from this webinar here (RSO and Mari Norgren).
Independent from these webinars, the RSO is always happy to help you with your proposals aiming to stay at Umeå University, no matter what stage they are at. If you would like to discuss yours, feel free to contact Anders or Jeanette on rso@umu.se.
Hope to see you at the UPS next event!
Authors: Karim Rafie/Miriam Becker
