Speaker 1: The first thing you need to know about writing a successful research project is that you need to get someone excited. The first thing, and the first thing you address in any research project is the what. You need to define what you're doing, but it's not just as easy as saying, this is what I'm going to do. You have to look at who's actually reviewing the research project, and then you need to get them excited. For example, if it's a grant funding body, you need to have a look at what they've had a look at in the past and funded, because if it's not part of that excitement sphere, they're probably not going to be very interested. If you are writing a research proposal for undergraduate, this is what you can do. The first thing I would do is head over to something like ChatGPT and put in the PDF documents of their recent papers. So this could be an academic supervisor that you're trying to impress or submit a research proposal to, and I would go in and get their most recent publications, and I'd say, create some research project ideas that this academic would love. And then it gave me these ones, development of an ultra-flexible transparent electrode. And by the way, these are my papers, so I do actually quite like these ideas, which is a good start. So here we've got next generation solar cells, quite broad, not really useful. Smart windows and optoelectronic devices, that's quite interesting to me. So now I'm starting to think, okay, what would be a first step towards a smart window that I could do in a certain time period? So this is actually a really nice way of getting those first touch points to see what would interest a particular scientist, because ultimately they're going to be the people that are going to read it and go, oh yeah, this is great. Here's the biggest tip, tip of the century. People make decisions based on emotion and then justify it with facts. So you need to get them excited so they go, oh yeah, this is really great. And also they've got all of the stuff in there that I need, so let's fund it or let's do this project. So for example, if I wanted to impress Dr. Christopher Gibson at Flinders University, I'd have a look at his profile. Say I want to get into his lab, I'd be here and I'd say, okay, he's interested in atomic force microscopy, AFM cantilever calibration, scanning electron microscopy. So let's have a look to see what ChatGPT does when it mashes all those ideas together. So I said here, I want a researcher with these interests to give me a position in their lab and I've got all of these here. What are some fun project ideas that they would love? And then based on that, it's given me all of these. And look, let me tell you this, Christopher Gibson, Dr. Gibson would absolutely love all of these. I know it because some of them are sort of things that he's doing already. So it is about the what you are doing. That's the first thing. It's about putting in the most sort of emotional hook you can for a particular funding body, a particular person, a particular department. That's what it's all about. So based on the literature of what you find and finding out the person or people or sort of like organization that are looking at your research proposal, you need to then start to define the what. And that is the research topic and the aims. And if you can align them to what they love, even better. That's the first step because we want to get them all emotional for the second step, which is just as important. The second thing you need in a research proposal is the why. You need to justify what you are doing. You do this by looking at the literature and finding the research gap. It's got even easier. I recently found out about this new tool called Research Kick here. I haven't tried it yet, but here all you need to do is put in some information and it will kick out compelling research questions and find research gaps in minutes. That's pretty interesting. Stay tuned and subscribe to the channel if you want to see me test this later on. But it's all about defining the why of your research. Why are you doing it? What's its unique aspect? And what part of the literature gap is it filling? Go check out my other video where I talk about research gaps using AI because it's just so easy to find them these days and it may be interesting for you right now. So importance, finding that research gap uniqueness, that's what needs to come across in the second part. That's what the second thing you need to address. So we've done the what, we now got the why we're doing it and now it's about how. And the nuts and bolts of the research is probably the most boring aspect of this but it needs to be done in a particular way. Here's the tricks. In the how aspect of your research proposal, you need to go through things like the methodology. Is it qualitative experiments? Is it quantitative? What kind of methods are you going to use? Are there other methods that aren't as good that you can sort of like talk about? These are all of the important nuts and bolts things about your research you need to address. If it is not in there, you will not be taken seriously. But remember, we have to take people on this journey of a successful research proposal where we have the emotional hook, the stuff they love, then you justify it, you deepen that connection by saying there is a gap in this literature and then we say how we're going to do it, the nuts and bolts of stuff. And that just means that, yeah, they're going to go, okay, I'm emotional, I love this, I love it, they've justified it, now they're giving me the facts and the figures, I like that. So next you need to talk about how. What methods are you going to use? Are you going to use certain analysis or data sets? And also, what high-level overview can you give of the methods? That's going to be very important because they need to see how you are going to start this research proposal. Is it going to be in a lab? Is it going to go out to a data set? Are you going to go do questionnaires? What is the starting point? They need to see you in their mind's eye actually starting this research because otherwise it's a little bit confusing to them and they will not allow you to continue with this project if they themselves cannot see the first thing to do. The last thing you should include in your research proposal towards the end is all of the boring admin stuff. We've got stuff like the budgeting, we've got stuff like the reporting. What sort of milestones will there be for your research proposal? All of these are so very important because it just means that once the academic has looked at all of the stuff and got excited about the research potential, then they're going to kick it to somewhere like the finance department or the administration department for the sort of like checks and balances of all the stuff that they don't want to do. So it's going to be stuff like whether or not you can sort of stick to a budget. Have you thought about how much things cost? Access to certain instruments, access to particular expertise, travel costs, are you going to conferences? That sort of stuff is going to be very, very important if you're doing a project research proposal. Also reporting, what sort of reporting is going to happen? Are there going to be checks throughout which makes sure that you're going to be on track to finish? And also how are you going to report those milestones? Are you going to have a meeting with people? Are you going to produce a document? Are you just going to sort of like have a checklist in an Excel document that you submit to someone every so often? It's those sort of like accountability things that really should be in the administrative section of a research proposal. And that can be later on towards the end of the research proposal because to be honest with you, it's not very exciting. No one's going to be super interested in it but it is very, very important for just those final checks before everyone says, yes, this is a great project. And the last thing for a research proposal is to make sure that you have everything checked and every box that is meant to be ticked is ticked or not ticked or you've filled out the right spots and you've included the right paperwork because I have seen so many research proposals get rejected because of the silly stuff. It is always the silly stuff that catches people out. So have someone look over, have you filled out the right forms? Have you provided the right information? Is the right box ticked? I have seen proposals that have been prepared for weeks and months not get through because of something silly. One thing I like to do with a research proposal is start from the end and read every sentence or every paragraph backwards because you start to sort of like get over familiar with the sentences that you've written but if you reverse the sentence, read the last sentence, the second last sentence, go that way, you start to see all of these tiny little errors that you haven't seen before. So there's one thing I used to do and also just make sure it goes through as many eyes as possible because otherwise you'll be in a world of pain when it's rejected for a stupid, silly reason. So use ChatGPT or another editing program like PaperPal or Rightful just to check your proposal and just make sure that you go through manually as often as humanly possible. I think the next video you should watch is this one where I talk about the five essential elements for any research proposal. It's a good watch, go now.