Thoughts from an OO newbie
PETER PHIBBS | MAY 2022
Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash
I have survived my second intensive burst of providing advice on draft ARC proposals (just finished the DP23 round and before that the DE23).
What's been interesting is that as you do more reviews you get more efficient. What has surprised me is how many good scholars make the same mistakes or have the same issues with their proposals. For example, talking about the research team as individuals but forgetting to mention anything about how the team has collaborated. This is probably unfortunate for the proposals but it does allow a reviewer to re-use a lot of their comments!
However, I think the biggest single issue that has struck me, particularly during the Discovery cycle is how poor the Project Aims and Background sections are in terms of developing a narrative about the importance of the project and the research gap the project is addressing. This does not seem to improve with research seniority – indeed more senior researchers can perform very poorly here. I think the problem may be that people are so close to their own project they are obviously convinced they are dealing with the most important issue on the planet and it’s almost tiresome to explain it. I think that when CIs share a draft with their colleagues, sometimes the feedback is not very robust (particularly for senior researchers) and they just assume everyone thinks like they do about the significance of their project. I suspect CIs cannot really put themselves in the shoes of a critical reviewer who needs convincing about why their project is worthwhile. I thought it was interesting that one CI wrote back to me after my review and conceded that they had a blind spot because they were too close to their project and appreciated someone who could provide a fresh set of critical eyes. They were able to make a pivot on the aims of their project to take my comments onboard without needing to disturb the large majority of the words in their proposal.
When I signed up with Outside Opinion I thought that I would just focus on mentoring and just do some occasional grant advice if something turned up in the middle of my research interests. However, over time I have become more engaged with the grant advice part of the business. I think this is a result of becoming more efficient but perhaps also over time you get more confident that you are providing useful advice through feedback from your CIs. I found it particularly gratifying reading the very positive assessor reports of some of my DE23 candidates whose first drafts were a long way from their submitted proposals.
