SMSC Diary (Week 13): Grant Proposals and Panels

This was our shortest week yet, as we only met for class the first half of the day Tuesday and had the rest off for Thanksgiving break. I was very grateful for this schedule as the low-intensity week allowed me to relax before leaving SMSC making the transition into Thanksgiving break easy.

Tuesday morning was spent reading and reviewing grant proposals written by our peers on the topic of their choosing. The grants were to follow a combination of the outlines set forth by the Undergraduate Research Scholars Program at GMU and the Smithsonian Women’s Committee.

Students were not limited by what they were allowed to propose, with the exception that it should fit within a semester (4 month) time period. Topics varied from full-fledged animal behavior studies to marketing campaigns to reinvigorate environmentally friendly programs at GMU. I proposed to conduct a lionfish diet study in which I would collect diet information from scientific literature. The information would then be incorporated into an ecosystem model that I would create to predict the influence of lionfish presence on the abundance of fishes in nursery habitats along Caribbean shorelines. Time permitting, the model could then be developed to account for other outside factors, such as climate change, on the lionfish feeding pressure.

The WEC class was split into two groups, so that we could evaluate the grants by the students not in our group. While the grants were meant to be anonymous, it was fun guessing which students wrote what based on the topic they chose. Once my group finished reading each proposal, we then needed to decide which grants would receive full funding, partial funding, and no funding. This part was challenging, as we only had $5,000 of mock money to give away and most projects cost about $3,000.

In the end our final decisions were reached by listing all options (grants proposed) on the board, then color coating which projects were our favorites (everyone voted for 1st-5th), which project seemed most feasible, which projects sounded good aside from a few points that we would need to follow up on and which projects were a good idea, but needed more detail in their execution. This process took us approximately an hour of debating, even though there were only 5 proposals! I had projects that I thought sounded better than others, but I also wanted to fund everyone to give them a chance. I cannot imagine the pressure of evaluating proposals for grants that receive hundreds, even thousands of applicants.

Overall, I found this to be an informative, yet amusing experience, and am happy this was how we spent our last day before Thanksgiving break!