Welcome to Season 2 of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke’s Building Up the Nerve, a podcast for neuroscience trainees that takes you through the components of a grant application with successful awardees. We know that applying for NIH funding can be daunting, but we’re here to help—it’s our job!
Lauren Ullrich:
On season two of Building up the Nerve, we are focusing on the components of a grant application with a particular emphasis on fellowship and career development awards. This season we've invited successful awardees to speak about their experiences and give advice for navigating the NIH system.
Marguerite Matthews:
And similar to last season, the goal is to demystify this process and make sure everyone can benefit from the experiences of previous awardees. We want you to have all the information you need to succeed. We hope that our podcast can live up to its name and help you build up the nerve to submit the best application you can. I'm Marguerite Matthews, a scientific program manager at NINDS.
Lauren Ullrich:
And I'm Lauren Ullrich, a program director at NINDS and we're the hosts of building up the nerve, a podcast for neuroscience trainees that takes you through the components of a grant application with successful awardees. We know that applying for NIH funding can be daunting, but we're here to help. It's our job. Here's a preview of what you can look forward to this season.
Clark Rosensweig:
My path to grad school was very nonlinear. So if there are people out there listening that, you know, that are looking at these awards and thinking this isn't for me, I, you know, I didn't go straight through, like, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to be when I was born. That's not what these awards are about these awards that are there to award you for whoever you are and whatever your path was to the place where you're at now.
Maria Ali:
Getting critiques is the best, because it tells you the things to focus on and what's going right, and what's going wrong, as opposed to just feeling like you're in this void. So be excited for critiques, you know, take them seriously, whether you agree with them or not, but just look at it as a way to get a clearer lens on the direction your grant should be going in.
Victoria Abraira:
And I think a lot of what people don't realize about sometimes some of these training mechanisms is that the science is one part, but the training is so essential, right? So you have to have like a really good plan and you have to have how each mentor is going to contribute to that plan and to how you're going to leverage those scientific interests to answer this cool question.
Nathan Smith:
It's like, you want to show the reviewers that you can do absolutely everything. You have all these ideas that are going around in your brain, and you put it all on paper. And in realistic terms its like, you cannot do everything. If its overambitious. I put my thinking cap on and it's like, you know what? I can actually move some of this to the alternative approaches. I don't have to put it all in, because you know, someone will say, this is overambitious, no way this person is able to achieve all of this.
Marguerite Matthews:
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