When writing proposals, it’s important to inform the reviewers what impact your project will have on your field of study. For competitions where reviewers are within your field, it may be easier to explain to them how your innovative ideas differ from the current literature. However, funding competitions often use reviewers who are not experts […]
Proposal Writing Advice
Proposal Writing Advice
How to Navigate the Funding Landscape as a Graduate Student
Applying for extramural funding is an integral part of any graduate career. Research grants and fellowships will provide you with crucial financial support as you pursue your course of study as well as bring distinction to your scholarly endeavors. Grants will typically support research related expenses while a fellowship will provide you with a stipend […]
Advice for Faculty Mentoring Working with their Graduate Student on Extramural Grant and Fellowship Applications
As a faculty mentor, you play a crucial role in the development of your student as a scholar and in writing a successful fellowship or grant application. Our graduate students have a much greater chance of success with their applications when their faculty mentors work with them throughout the process. Faculty involvement is essential in […]
Take a Minute to Review Formatting Guidelines
In the summer calm before the major funding deadline season this fall, graduate students everywhere are making decisions on what applications they should write and beginning to outline and draft essays. One seemingly minor component of these essays is the formatting of the document that must be submitted. However, the format of the document is […]
Relating Your Funder’s Purpose to Your Award Application
So you started working on your award application, but you are unsure of how your research project advances the goals of the funding agency. What do you do? In a grant or fellowship application, you will want to make a compelling connection between your research and the goals of the granting institution. However, to learn this […]
Responding to Reviewer Comments
As aspiring academics, rejection is just one of those things we have to get used to- many excellent peer-reviewed papers, academic book proposals, and of course grant applications went through multiple rounds of “no” before the final “yes.” Within this process of “revise and resubmit,” the reviewer comments given for a previous submission can become […]
Understanding your funder and the awards it offers
Why do organizations provide money for grants and fellowships? Knowing the answer to this question (which varies depending on the specific funder) helps elucidate the ways in which graduate students need to approach applying for external funding. Without knowing the underlying mission behind an award, be it public or privately funded, it is difficult to […]
Fulbright Application Process Series: What Goes into a Completed Application
Welcome to the first installment in an occasional series on applying for Fulbright support as a graduate student. As the Assistant Dean for Graduate Student External Support in the School of Graduate Studies, I am the GSNB’s advisor for the Fulbright IIE Research/Study and ETA grants and the Fulbright Hays. The focus of today’s post […]
Where Do I Start? Finding Good Advice on Proposal Writing
When you think about writing the first draft of a proposal, you may have trouble finding a starting point. Indeed, the first step to writing any good funding application is getting past the first blank page. Along with GradFund’s resources, like blog posts (see Crafting the Research Question as an example), there are other online […]
Preparing for your GradFund Meeting
At Gradfund, all members of the Rutgers University graduate student community are invited to schedule a meeting to discuss funding options and have application drafts reviewed. To get the most out of your meeting with GradFund, please see the tips below for both meeting types: Planning and Application Review. Planning Meetings During planning meetings, you […]