Abstract

Writing a good application is what many researchers struggle with. This is especially eminent among early career researchers that are trying to get their first funding. Most universities provide writing masterclasses in form of seminars and workshops and if they are lucky there are some internal review systems available. However, we have noticed that despite regular seminars and workshops, researchers make the same mistakes over and over again.
In an innovative workshop we have taken proposal development to a new level. The workshop is divided into two parts. In part one, the participants are given real applications to read and review with the same criteria used by the funder. They will act as review panel. After discussions, scoring and ranking of the applications, the participants are provided with the scores and ranking from the real panel to compare with their own. In part two, we have a discussion about: the review process, how well/bad their scoring compared to the real outcome, How the writing style affects the review, and more. We also steer the discussion towards a more structured reflection on, for example, how Aims and Objectives are formulated, what a good figure looks like.
In this presentation, I will go through how to set up such a workshop, the results we see, what the feedback is.
Learning outcomes: Ideas on how to take proposal development to a new level.