Contact the GGC Consultants

By Karen Bayne

The GGC and the GPSO teamed up recently to let IU graduate students know more about the services provided free of charge by the consultants at the GradGrants Center.

Two sessions were held in Woodburn in late October; about 18 students attended our get-together on a rainy Tuesday, while over fifty came to the second session held a few days later.

GGC graduate students and consultants Gordan Vurusic, Alfredo Minetti, and Karen Bayne gave brief presentations drawn from GGC workshops. These mini-presentations were intended to highlight the variety of services and opportunities provided by the GGC.

Alfredo mentioned the variety of focused workshops offered by the GGC each year, and then gave an overview of the GGC website. Highlights were the workshops page that lists upcoming workshops, and also the useful IUB links and sponsoring organization links pages. These resources gather links to many grant and sponsor organizations' Web pages in one centralized location to assist graduate students to find sources of external funding. There is also a listing of IU resources.

Karen demonstrated how to search the three on-line grants databases to which IU subscribes. While the GGC consultants are happy to run these searches for graduate students who complete our search form questionnaires, running your own searches often allows you to refine your searches to obtain better and more focused results. Karen offered a variety of tips on how to search the databases in order to avoid being overwhelmed by a lengthy list of grant opportunities that are not really applicable to your particular project. She also provided a copy of the handout from the Grants on the Net workshop so that the students could try these searches on their own after the information session.

One of the GGC's Proposal Writing Consultants, Gordan Vurusic, then shared some of his insights into the fine art of writing grant proposals, which are, as Gordan stated, a genre unlike any other form of academic writing! Gordan's PowerPoint presentation was drawn from his longer grant writing workshop and offered some very helpful advice. Among the useful points Gordan highlighted were the basics such as adhering to the technical specifications (page length, font, deadlinles, etc.) of the grant proposal, as well as some excellent insight into how grants are reviewed and awarded and thus how one should write and prepare the grant proposal. He also stressed that the grant proposal should "sell" your proposed research project and its feasibility.