The costs of tuition, research, and dissertations can be very high for doctoral students. The fact that so many organizations care about aiding students’ research projects in ways that help them is a blessing, but to be considered for such an opportunity, one must be able to write up a good proposal for the grant.
Grants are considered free money, given for a particular purpose like research. Writing grants is a labour-intensive process, especially when you’re not fully equipped. Sometimes it can feel like another part-time job to just do research and grant applications.
Turns out, free money isn’t cheap!
Grant Writing Tips
The following grant writing tips are geared toward equipping you with the latest technical skills required in making your proposal stand out.
Identifying potential grant and financing organizations
This is the most important aspect of your grant-seeking journey. You must ensure that the degree to which the objectives of your application are based, aligns closely with the aims of the funding organization, which will determine whether you stand a chance of getting the grant. Finding potential grantors requires a lot of work, but in the end, it will be worth it. Even if your study proposal is the most compelling in the world, you are unlikely to get finance if you don’t submit it to the appropriate organizations.
Be specific about your funding needs
Needing money is one thing; it’s quite another to persuade a committee that your requirements are more pressing than those of any other candidate for that particular grant or fellowship. Thus, you must be very specific about your financial needs and state how you’ll deploy these funds to aid your research.
Study your audience
Before putting pen to paper make sure you know your audience. This is very crucial not only for grant writing but also for all forms of academic writing. Follow the steps below;
- Carefully read the grant description and financing guidelines.
- Examine them with the same level of care and diligence you give your dissertation research.
- Analyze it and tailor your proposal accordingly.
- Justify how your efforts will further the granting organization’s objectives.
- Indicate in detail how your proposal will do that if the organization hopes to have a tangible impact on society as a result of its funding plans.
- Don’t leave it unstated.
Adopt the Hourglass Model approach for grant-writing
Both the structure and the content of your proposal are important. Adopting the hourglass model of grant writing is one of our finest pieces of advice for graduate students.
An hourglass grant proposal conforms to the following structure:
- A broad introduction to your research field or dissertation topic.
- Survey of the current state of the field/topic.
- Identifying a specific gap in the literature that has heretofore gone unnoticed.
- Clear, concise explanation of how your project will fill this gap and solve this problem.
- Concrete details on the sources, methods, and previous scholarship you plan to draw on
- A brief explanation of the immediate impacts you expect your work to have on your area of focus.
- Broad conclusion showing how your project will benefit your scholarly field and areas of interest of the granting organization.
- From the above, the proposal begins broadly, gets more specific and finally zooms out to clarify the project’s overall purpose.
Review your grant proposal
No matter how well you think your proposal is, it might only be compelling and appealing to you and incomprehensible to another person. So, make sure you get your proposal reviewed by a person of higher academic authority or strive to see your grant proposal from an outside observer’s point of view.
From the process of searching for a suitable grant offer to the completion of the proposal, you must agree with me that the process is a herculean task one that Academic Hive and are willing to help you out with.
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