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UCL Research Programme

Think-Write: Writing targeted grant proposals

Overview:
Winning a grant is not easy, and grant writing always carries a distinct element of risk. It is, however, an essential part of academic life. Carefully targeting the right funding body, and selling your idea can improve your chances. Writing the grant with an efficient process can also minimise the time taken and leave you free to get on with your work, or wring another grant.

The process is complicated by the need to demonstrate the feasibility of you project, not just in terms of academic milestones you hope to achieve, but in the justification of the sums of money requested, the timescales you propose to deliver them in. On top of this, you need to be aware of financial issues associated with employing people and the top-slicing frequently associated with working in an academic body.

Anticipated learning outcomes:

By the end of this session, you will have a fuller understanding of:

assessing what a targeted grant awarding body is trying to achieve,
work out the key players in the decision-making process associated with an individual grant,
see how their proposed project can enable the awarding body to meet its goals,
critically analysing the questions in the grant request forms you have brought with you to the course, so that they give members of the reviewing panel the information they need to come to a positive decision,
introduce some aspects of project management and time management into their grant writing strategy,
build public engagement and communication elements in to your proposal,
have guidelines for developing a feasibility study that can help assess whether your goal is genuinely deliverable within your proposed constraints - time, money, personnel, etc. and
have a clearer idea of the sorts of sums of money that you will need to ask for.

Participants:

You should come on this course if you:

are about to write your first grant proposal,
find grant-writing an unfocussed and/or time-consuming task
would like to have a more strategic approach to grant winning and funding your research

Pre-requisites: None

Roberts' transferable skills addressed:

Communications skills
Career management
Research environment

Date, time and venue: 1 day workshop

Date	Time	Venue
25 June 2013	1000 - 1600	Engineering Front & Executive Suite

Facilitator: Pete Moore gained his PhD at the University of Reading before working as a post-doc at UCL. For the past decade he has worked as a freelance science writer contributing to international media, as well as writing more than 10 books and numerous papers and articles. He has run over 100 training courses throughout northern Europe.

Cost:

Free for all staff on the UCL payroll
£160 for UCL Affiliated/Higher Education Institutions/Charities
£400 for External Applicants

How to book: Booking Form

OSD Course Contact: Ed Drinkwater

See also:

To view the other three workshops in the Think-Write series please click on the links below.

Think-Write: Conference Abstracts and Papers
Think-Write: Quality Papers
Think-Write: Writing A Peer Review

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