First Proposal Rejection
A few weeks ago, I had my first proposal rejection and it wasn’t pleasant. I definitely had to break out the scotch. This was a huge proposal with many universities involved and while I counted myself fortunate to be a part of the team, I’m still disappointed. My part was a supportive role for the overall proposal ideas, but it still would have been a significant chunk of money to jumpstart my academic career. The one thing that’s really disappointing, especially since this was my first proposal, is that the entity holding the purse strings is not one that gives you feedback but just says “thanks but no thanks”. When I started writing my first couple of proposals, I dreamed with delusions of grandeur (hitting my first 5 in row or something stupid like that) but I definitely feared striking out. My startup funds are available for the first two years so I basically…
When writing takes a backseat
I’ve been thinking about writing lately, particularly the skill involved and various writing styles and approaches to writing. It’s been talked about here on Engineer Blogs before. GEARS has talked about writing for labs and his particular preferences for the ritual of writing as well as writing proposals. And I’ve talked about technical writing before. But I’m thinking today about more basic writing skills. As in natural spelling and grammar spells (which you know of course means I’ve just doomed myself to those sorts of mistakes in this post). How important are those kinds of skills to an engineer? I’ve seen plenty of engineers who lack these basic skills. Their handwritten notes often misspell the same word in several different ways within just a few sentences of one another. Their word documents often include homonyms and disjointed sentence fragments as well as run-on paragraphs. Beyond these basics there also tends to be…
Writing in Style
Ok, I promise this is my last post on writing (at least for a while). Between writing three papers (still out for review) and two proposals over the last few months, I was looking forward to setting up my lab and working on lecture prep for my fall Lab/Project course. Now, granted, most of the writing I’m doing right now involves me and my arch-rival (Word). And when I’m blinded by white-hot rage with the stupid quirks of Word, I need to switch to a different topic. Lately, that involves brainstorming for new topics to research or flushing out ideas that started on the back of a napkin. While I’d love to share some ideas with the masses, that’s probably not the most prudent choice. Rather, I thought I would talk about penning my ideas in my lab note book (see what I did there?). I’m pretty much a scribble…