Direction

I now have a better idea as to what I would like to do for my lay and expert papers. I am going to focus on grant writing and I believe my focus will be to try and highlight those things that make a grant successful and those that make them fail. I will sit down this weekend and start looking at some sources I have collected through my interview as well as those I gathered while just looking to see what books the library offered.

Thus far I have interviewed Dr. Hugh Spitler in the Department of Public Health Sciences. From within the department I have a vast amount of resources including successful and failed grants, professors who have worked on different types of grants, as well as Virginia Baird who is the grants coordinator for the College of Health, Education and Human Development. I am also going to try and contact people who work within Grant Support Services to get a little more insight.

I have recently stumbled across what are known as mini-grants that the university seems to promoting. I will check out the website provided on the brochure to see the different types of grants that one can apply for. My hope is to maybe find a professor who is going to participate in one of these mini grants and from the get-go get in on the process to see how it is done. If this is at all possible, it will help tremendously with preparing my two papers.

As we discussed, I do believe I will make my lay paper a journal/newspaper article (or the like) and my expert paper will be an actual grant. I need to further discuss with you the details behind this, but as of now this is my direction. I'm making a move on this as soon as possible so that I can make changes as needed.

I am optimistic that this project will help me in the long run. It has been my goal to develop as many different writing styles as possible so that when I enter the work force I have a diverse background. I do not know if I am necessarily interested in going into strictly research, but I would at least like to start to develop the skills sooner than later.