On 12th March 2021, UPS and Umeå University Research Support Office (RSO) joined forces and we hosted our first Career Development Seminar.
Acquisition of funding for your own position and scientific projects is an important and essential part of the academic career path. To learn more about this, we invited Jeanette Bröms and Anders Wennström from the RSO (rso@umu.se). They were happy to give an overview about how the RSO can help during writing, the pitfalls of writing a grant proposal and different funding bodies.
Anders presented the work of the RSO and the workshops offered by Umeå University followed by the Dos and Don’ts for writing a good grant proposal. In the second part, Jeanette guided us through the jungle of funding bodies and provided us with a big overview of grants for different stages of early career researchers.
You can download their presentations here: Part I and Part II.
In the last part of the event, we invited fellow researcher from our PostDoc community for a panel discussion. Mirjam Hunziker, Zsofia Réka Stangl, Jan Jamroskovic, and Matthias Siewert shared their experiences on grant writing with us. After a short introduction, the discussion covered questions from:
- how they found the grants to which they wanted to apply,
- how they went about writing them,
- what they would have like to know before writing them or
- which they advice they can give now.
A consensus was that one should allocate enough time for thinking, reading and writing, and that for some it is easier to stop lab work completely and just focus on writing the grant. And don’t forget – rejections are a normal part of the process of applying for research money.
If you haven’t given us your feedback on the event, take a few minutes to do it here! Thank you and see you at our next event!
