Grant writing and dragon chasing

I wanted to post last week but every last ounce of my writing ability has been used up lately by a grant application I'm writing that is due on Friday. At the massive length of...6 pages...I am very much looking forward to submitting it. 6 pages, you say? I know, it sounds short.  It's comprised of 3 different essays: personal statement, previous research, and proposed research - and each essay could be no longer than 2 pages.

It sounds great- 2 pages is nothing! But that's precisely the difficulty. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, graduate students all across the nation apply for this grant and it is extremely competitive. I have technically been working on it since the end of August, but I've really been putting excessive effort in since the beginning of October. And the deadline is almost here. I have revised my essays so many times (with the help of some wonderful students and professors who selflessly edited for me), and now, I have to laugh when I look back to my first drafts because they seem so poorly written. (It's kind of like how I feel when I look back to the essay I submitted with my application to Knox College. Yikes! My high school senior writing skills were definitely not as up to snuff as I thought they were.)  But I think that type of improvement is a good sign. It's hard to delete sentence after sentence, word after word, that I meticulously put into place, just to get down to 2 pages. Having my near-final essays, however, I see how helpful that tedious process was.

So what it is this opportunity exactly? Well, this is a 3-year grant that would be in place of the tuition support and stipend that I'm currently receiving from the University of Iowa. A grant like this really provides freedom, to pursue the research I want because, although I'll are working in the Health, Brain and Cognitive Lab, I'd be much more independent. The purpose of the grant is to foster developing scientists, particularly scientists that hold promise of benefiting society. Although one of the essays is a proposal of the research I plan to conduct in the next few years, the personal statement and previous research essays were also very important because, as so many people told me, I'm "selling myself as a scientist to the panelists." Everyone's applications will get reviewed by 3 separate panelists and will be given scores on "intellectual merit" and "broader impacts", so those were some of the things I had to emphasize in my essays. It's also a little scary to think that each reviewer will read my entire application for only 10-15 minutes, before making a decision. I attended a workshop at the beginning of the year focusing on this grant and all of the leaders emphasized just how quickly the reviewers have to get through the applications. For that reason, the flow of the essay is incredibly important because you don't want there to be any "sand traps" where a reader might get stuck.

So do you want to know what I proposed? I'll give a little run down :) I'm currently working in the Health, Brain and Cognition Laboratory (check this out if you want to know more) and, after a 10 week rotation in a neurosurgery lab, I plan to come back to this lab for good (i.e. for the rest of my graduate career). In that time, one of the things I'll be learning is how to analyze data from structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We, in the lab, have access to a large dataset from the University of Illinois, of an exercise intervention run with senior citizens in the Champaign County area. It was a 6-month intervention study, isolating the differences between aerobic exercise (walking), dancing and stretching and toning. They also assessed multiple cognitive abilities through various tasks and experiments. We will eventually be working with that data to understand specific neural changes in association with the interventions. Ultimately we want to elucidate the best types of exercise, so that those can be used to help prevent (or recover from) age-related diseases.

Hopefully that all made sense :)

And now for the dragons part. I just think this is so cool. I went to the gym Saturday night after returning to Iowa City from home (where I had a lovely time celebrating Abby's birthday!!) and I didn't have a clear idea of how I wanted to work out so I just found one of the stationary bikes and did a little warm up. I had noticed this particular line of bikes previously but had never used them, but they have a screen and are connected to this super cool video game with various courses and races. Now, I like a mind-freeing, only listen to music, get lost in the workout, kind of workout just as much as the next guy (and maybe more) but sometimes, to give yourself that extra motivation to work...you need some competition! The graphics are sweet, the scenery is surprisingly pretty, the other riders are fun to beat and it just was way more fun than I expected. Saturday night I think I "rode my bike" around a course with Redwood trees and a stream and then around another one by the ocean. I liked it so much that I went and did the exact same thing Sunday night, after a full day of studying, writing essays (for the grant!) and...this is the important part...not eating very much food. I hopped on the bike and warmed up, just like the previous night. I went through a half an hour or so of normal "race" riding and was feeling great. And then I found this awesome section called "chases". There was only one available but it was a game where you ride around grabbing coins and finding dragons of different colors for different points and finding special lanterns that either make you go really fast for a while or make everything extra points. And it was way fun. And I got way too into it. I just really really wanted to get those dragons. So much so that when I was on 16th gear and I had to suddenly go up a really sharp hill to get a coin, I just stood up and pushed as hard as I could to make it. I won't say it wasn't fun...because it totally was.  But the lack of food got to me or something and I think by the time I got off the bike and put my leg down by my knees I was about 5 seconds away from passing out.

Moral of the story?  Don't chase dragons on an empty stomach.
But I will totally be working out on those bikes again because that actually was super fun, besides almost fainting, of course.

That's all for now! Thanks for reading :)