Why Grant Writing | Yi Huang
I was born and grew up in China. Before age of 24, I learned the world from my textbooks. I used my parents’ money to pay my tuition and purchase textbooks. To pass my college qualification exam, I had to memorize the theories from the textbook when I was in high school, though, some of them were not “correct”. When I graduated from college, I made my decision to study abroad; I came to America. After got my master’s degree, I was thinking I should put my academic accumulations into practical use and found a position at Vanderbilt University. During that time, I found that most theories are “out-of-date”. For example, my advisor strongly suggested that do not use a“forward/backward stepwise” method in analysis. Hence, I had to find other methodologies to use. Due to the limited knowledge, it was so hard for me to fully understand everything. That is the reason I applied the Ph.D program in biostatistics at SLU. In the future, I would like to be a PI myself and develop my own statistical methods, so grant applications are a must step to support my own research. Thanks to Dr. Juliet and Alexis, I have learned many skills about how to write a grant proposal. These skills will play important roles in my future research and support my statistical development.
