Writing Grants

The different elements of my grant writing experience

Scroll to explore the different elements of my remote professional practice (RPP) that I experienced (also featured in the table of contents to the right) or click the button below to discover my RPP team homepage. Our homepage will give you a description of what type of proposal we had to write and you can connect to my team member's sites to see from their perspective!

Don't forget to check out the trivia after each step :).

Click on the buttons below to see our team homepage and find the description of the remote professional practice objectives or if you want to learn more about the Erasmus + application.

Brainstorming for innovative ideas


Under the context for the Erasmus + application as mentioned on the team's main page, we were tasked with coming up with an innovative idea. I wanted to use this opportunity to, at the same time, come up with a solution for one of the science industry's largest needs. We are keeping our idea secret for now but Cosmos was one of my inspirations during this brainstorm.


Brainstorming different ideas


TV series: Cosmos


Q&A: Do you know how much time we gave ourselves to come up with a new idea?

We decided to allow ourselves the first week to come up with ideas and make our teams.

Pitching our Ideas and forming teams

We pitched our ideas to our remote professional practice (RPP) group and then split into 2 smaller teams. We went from a group of 6 to groups of 3 but the groups still remained connected to each other throughout the internship. Pitching and developing ideas together are useful skills that we practiced and improved here.

Q&A: Do you know all the countries where the team members were located during the RPP?

A total of 5 different countries: Canada, Portugal, France, Switzerland, and Ukraine

Team Meetings

We had regular meetings to keep our project on track and learned the importance of creating meeting agendas and reports. This team made the internship more enjoyable and although I had never met my team members before this internship, we worked well together and created a fun working environment for ourselves.

Q&A: Do you know what application we used for our meetings?

Microsoft Teams

Needs Analysis Research

One of the sections I worked on in the project description was the needs analysis section and I had to research documents to support our plan and further search the need of our project idea.

The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication

“popular understanding of how scientists generate knowledge is freighted with misleading simplifications. The gap between how people think science works and how it actually does can itself generate confusion that undermines public confidence”.

Talking with Barmaids: The Importance of Science Communication in Today’s Changing World

"Awareness and understanding of scientific ideas and issues by those without scientific training is vital, if the world is to regulate carbon emissions,control over-population or make the best use of nano-technology. Today’s scientific endeavours are often so large and so complicated the scientists doing the research do not have the time or skills to talk about their work with the public."

Q&A: Why did we have to conduct a needs analysis?

For grants to be accepted or approved you need to justify there is a need for what you propose.

Work Package Creation

First step to project design

The project description was so large, at first we did not know where to start. We then learned the work packages were an important first element to focus on in creating our project proposal.

Work Package outline

Once we completed the work packages it created the backbone of our proposal. After creating our goals into manageable packages we could then begin expanding on these ideas in the other sections of the project description.

WP1, WP3, WP5

I specifically worked on the work packages for the preparation, implementation, and evaluation

Q&A: What are work packages?

Work packages are the units that make up the work breakdown structure and is a group of related tasks, almost like sub-projects. We had 6 work packages in total for our project.

Possible Budget draft

Budgeting

For each of the staff planned to participate in the project, we had to breakdown the budget into working days and to produce a budget that fits the tasks.

I particularly looked at the Learning Mobility budget.

Here is a sample of our budgeting in progress.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P_pj35VnMhKYbt6SuQAFRGFeyxQ0OxdowME1GCaw1WU/edit?usp=sharing

Q&A: Can you guess the maximum funding budget for an Erasmus+ KA2 Knowledge Alliances proposal?

Up to 700 000 euros for a 2 year duration and 1 000 000 euros for a 3 year duration.

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