For me, “why grant writing” starts from “why writing” | Yueqi Li
There is a popular Chinese saying, “The faintest ink is better than the best memory.”
My mom repeatedly emphasized this sentence since I was very young. At that time, I did not get what it meant, and I believed my memory was good enough. However, things changed as I grew up. “When you love someone/something, you write it down; when you hate someone/something, you also write it down.” “Write down everything that you don’t want to tell but don’t want to forget.” I actually forgot from whom or where I heard about these words but that’s when writing began to play a part in my life. Writing, for me makes me relieved and happy, regardless what I write. It’s like creating a small universe for your own so you are always the center.
Then I chose communication as my undergraduate major and since then I developed a routine to write something early in the morning, which do help me a lot for both my study and my life. It allows me to concentrate, think, read, and learn. I still remembered how excited I was when I saw the piece of news I wrote as a trainee journalist appear in the daily newspaper that my family subscribed for years. I was thinking it would be wonderful if I could keep writing for the rest of my life and also make a living with it. Back then, I knew nothing about public health.
My interests in maternal and child health was fostered through my experience working in several non-profit organizations that served racial minority women and children. These experiences highlighted for me the disproportionate risks of multiple poor outcomes bear by these vulnerable population and nurtured my interest in addressing health disparities and mitigate the burden of chronic disease.
My initial grant writing experience came from an intro class of grant writing during my MPH study at Emory University. The course touched base of different types of grants, the basic components of a grant proposal and views from the funder’s perspective. Although I only wrote a short foundation grant proposal with my teammates in that course, I was fascinated by the idea that writing a grant actually allows me to practice all different skills that I have learnt throughout the program such as program planning, making budget and developing evaluation plan.
I also became interested in mental health from this experience since my grant focused on increasing access to mental health care services and reduce self-stigma around mental health care to youth in great need, on behalf of a behavioral health organization. Later during my first-year PhD, I was also involved in two grants drafting for my mentor’s projects, which further increased my understanding of how to make a compelling grant from the very beginning paragraph.
All these experiences solidified my desire to pursuing a career in academia and achieving the long-term goal of improving maternal and child health. Specifically, I am interested in research on social and environmental determinants that influence health-related behaviors and risk of chronic diseases as well as mental health disorders, particularly in resource-constrained settings for the high-risk population.
To accomplish my goal, grant writing is necessary and critical as both research and intervention require funding to support. Therefore, this course is very helpful and will be an important step guiding my journey to well-written grants that really convey the need and help address the proposed problems. I’m not a good writer, but I believe writing will continuously play an important role in my life.
