My “Why” to Grant Writing | Xiao Li
My journey to epidemiology might be different from others. I studied pharmaceutical engineering in college and health data science for my master’s program. Neither of them is a public health-focused program. Luckily, I met with Dr. Cao who is a promising cancer epidemiologist at Washington University STL in 2018 and worked with her for an entire year as a research assistant. She mentored me and helped me get through the door of epidemiology. But, the most important thing she has taught me was neither fancy models nor complex study designs — “Attention paid to small things has big rewards.” — it is the most precious knowledge I have gained during the internship, and it keeps reminding me that the details are important.
While working on some at-school projects, I used to fall into a mindset — “It won’t be a big deal if I don’t finish this part. I will still get an “A”. However, this attitude has been proved completely wrong at work. Because it’s my career, I have to be a perfectionist and detail-oriented. I benefit from her advice a lot because it helps me to pursue perfection, stay focused, and keep challenging myself.
Hard work always pays off. After finishing the internship, I got a job working for Dr. Cavazos in the department of psychiatry. Although I didn’t receive conventional epidemiology training and my master’s program focuses more on analytical programming, I benefited from the intensive training I received from Dr. Cao; I still got the offer of working as a statistical data analyst. During that time, epidemiology was still new to me, and psychiatry epidemiology was another brand-new field to me. Starting is the hardest part of lots of things. But I had to learn how to overcome those fears. I remember I even didn’t know how to spell “marijuana” on the first day of my job. I was so lucky that I got unconditional support and help from colleagues and PIs. There was a huge size whiteboard in my old office. One of my colleagues, Dr. Borodovsky, always tried his best to visualize the problems and elaborate them to me. In order to make sure I truly understood it, he always cleaned up the whiteboard afterward, handed me a pen, and asked me to explain everything to him. “Please teach me like 10 years old with very bad ADHD”, he said.
While working as a statistician, I am responsible to draft statistical relevant sections of a grant proposal. Over the years, my grant writing has been very uncreative because every time I am supposed to use “standard” scientific language in the sections.
I want to do creative writing; I want to write my grant to explore the topic I am interested in. Specifically, I want to study adolescent substance misuse. I was born and raised in China. About 200 years ago (B.C. 1840s), China experienced and struggled with Opium War. The Chinese government has very different regulations and enforcement toward substance use problems, compared with the United States. To understand the substance misuse problem, I want to conduct a population-level analysis to disentangle the dynamic system of a variety of social determinants. Of course, it would be nice to have grants to support my research.
I understand that continuing to write is part of my job. As a researcher, there are two most important parts of an academic career consisting of scientific writing (aka, papers or publications) and grant writing. We need to publish more papers so that we can put other new ideas into a grant proposal. Meanwhile, we can present our work in the preliminary finding section of a grant proposal. If we receive more grant awards, we will obtain more support at work, not just financially.
So far, personally, the biggest challenge is that I don’t know how to present my research/my work/my findings so I’m always very hesitant to participate in any conferences. It’s important to me that I recognized my weakness and tried to gain more knowledge and use more help in how to improve this skill. For this class, I want to learn some tricks about telling stories, how to articulate myself, and how to catch people’s attention in a few sentences.
