Things to do before you start writing the grant.

As a Ph. D. student in the Neuroscience Program at UWO, you will write a grant proposal. Here are some helpful hints for this task and for when you have to write a real proposal.

Write up your current research:

• Finish off you current studies and submit as many papers for publication as possible.
• Papers must be in the 'in press' stage to count.
• An acceptance from a journal gives the research work an important stamp of approval.
• You will be assessed largely on your track record. This is based almost entirely on your published papers.

Get to know the agency you are applying to.

• Decide which agency is most like to be interested in your work by knowing their aims. Visit your research office.  Click here for Western's Office of Research Services
• Find out the success rates for that agency. It will give you some idea of the effort involved.
• Find out the average $ amount that was funded. This will give you an idea of which items you can reasonably ask for.
• Get the forms. See what they want. Click here for the current CIHR of Canada forms.
• Within the agency, find which committee deals with grants on your sub-topic. Find out the background of the committee members. Click here for the current CIHR peer review membership. Click here for NSERC membership
• Talk to someone who is sitting on or has sat on this committee. Find out what they are looking for.
• Talk to people that have reviewed grants. Ask them what they are looking for and in particular which type of grants were not rated highly. Ask them how the committee operates.

Getting preliminary data.

• There is nothing as valuable as trying to do the experiment before writing the application.
• This is the best way of discovering, for yourself, where the pitfalls are.
• There is no better way to demonstrate that the experiment is feasible than by showing preliminary data.
• Most successful scientists learn to develop a phase lead in their research, using their present funding to explore promising new directions, focusing in on those that pan out, and then proposing experiments that in large part are already in the bag.