Speaker 1: What if I told you that graduate school, undergraduate research, or travel for your dissertation could be funded? While some of you may be nodding your head because you know of or have applied to grants and fellowships before, there are still so many people still paying for their degrees and the research that supports it out of pocket. I however want to help you indicate, apply for, and improve your odds of securing grants and fellowships so you can be well on your way to contributing to your field, reduce the strain studying can place on your finances, and enjoy the opportunities that funded research has to offer. Hello everyone, welcome or welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, my name is Kaylin. I am a fourth year PhD candidate in history and African American studies. And while I am in a fully funded PhD program at Yale, I have secured over $20,000 worth of research grants in order to pursue archival research abroad. This has meant that I've been able to live in London and focus on my research rather than having to teach in order to support myself. In today's video, I'm going to be sharing all of my best tips for how it is to find and apply for research funding. And we're going to be breaking it into six different parts. First and foremost, we're going to talk about the general application requirements. This may differ depending on your field of study, but these are the primary statements and requirements that are often asked for with funding applications. Number two is actually how to find funding and where to look for it. Third, we're going to talk about how to write a research proposal for funding application and more specifically, how to make your research proposal stand out for a funding committee. Number four, we're going to be covering resumes and CV guidelines. This may differ depending on your field of study and may differ depending on the actual application, but we're going to be going over some of the things that you need to know and need to make sure are in your CV before you send. Fifth, we're going to be covering any additional statements that might come up. And then lastly, we're going to talk a little bit about letters of recommendation. I just want to say a quick thank you to the sponsor of today's video, which is Unriddle. This is an AI research tool for literature reviews for improving your research workflow. And I'll talk about them a little bit more later on in this video. But without further ado, it is time to go ahead and jump into section number one, which is general application requirements. Applications are going to ask for four primary things. First is a statement of some kind. Some call this a statement of intent, a research proposal, or a project description. This may vary. Secondly, they may ask you for an abstract. This is going to be an abbreviated version of your research proposal that hits on the main points of your project. The third is your CV. And then the fourth are letters of recommendation. There are applications that may ask for things like written samples, diversity statements, leadership statements, cover letters. And while this video will not be covering the specifics of how to actually approach these statements, I will be giving some further information in section six of the video. So be sure to stick around if you have a written sample, leadership statement, or anything of the like that you may have to produce for your applications, because I'll give you some helpful tips. Now it's time for section number two, which is where to find funding. As far as I'm aware, there are six major types of funding schemes available to graduate students or undergrads that are pursuing research. First, you have funding that is available through your central university. The second is funding made available by your department. Third is finding funding through private agencies on LinkedIn. The fourth is field-based associations. Think about your field of study and the annual conference that is usually held. So for example, as a historian of legal history, they've got the American Society of Legal Historians conference every year. And that conference or that organization is associated with a journal. And they also have funding for graduate study. They have fellowships for people writing their dissertations. They have travel grants so people can attend the conference. So it's important to check out your field-specific organizations because they likely have pockets of funds that are made available to graduate students. These organizations, unfortunately, rarely have opportunities for undergrads. But for undergrads, I do recommend looking at your own university and the department. Funding can be a little bit finicky depending on what stage you are in your education. And so make sure that you're reading the fine print because there are some applications that on the surface will look like something that anybody can apply for, but they may have tighter restrictions on whether you are a PhD candidate, what stage you are at with your dissertation, and things of that nature. So make sure that you're checking all of the requirements as you're going through these applications to make sure that it's something that you're actually eligible for. The fifth type of funding is from libraries and research institutions. So for example, the Library of Virginia or the Library of Maryland or the Library of Congress will have a pocket of funding for independent researchers or researchers from other institutions to come and do research. These are largely available at university libraries. So for example, looking at the Bodleian Library at Oxford or the British Library, these are really great sources for finding pockets of money. They don't usually have very long-term fellowships and they don't have huge pockets of money, but they do often have smaller grants that will allow you for a month to three months of research. And so make sure to look at libraries and research institutions. And lastly, you have your national or federal grants. And so this includes the NSF grant, so the National Science Foundation, the SSRC, the Social Science Research Council, AHA, the American Historical Association. These organizations that are discipline specific also have big pockets of money that usually come from a government agency. And there's also, for example, the National Endowment for the Humanities, for us that study the humanities. So make sure that you're looking widely for funding, because in my experience, a lot of these resources are hidden. And most of the time, the reason that people know about them is because they have an advisor or they have a friend who had applied for them or is aware of them. And as somebody who came into academia as a community college student and who didn't have a lot of experience knowing where to look for things, by comparison to my colleagues that have been applying for funding since they were in high school or in undergrad to do research projects, I just felt a little bit out of my depth. And so hopefully breaking it down into these different categories to help you begin your search will be helpful to you. Now we're moving on to part three, which is how to write a research proposal. Now this could be a video in and of itself, because this is the meat and potatoes of your funding application. And whether it is called a statement of intent, a project description, or a research proposal, these things essentially mean the same thing, which is that the committee is going to want you to outline the project you are looking for funding to support. This is going to include not only the intervention of the project, but also needs to discuss how it is that that project is being performed and how the funding will be used throughout the term. Every application has a different term length that has different recommendations for the project description or research proposal. And the lengths can vary from 500 words up to 3000 words. This is going to be a very general overview. Ideally, this should be a separate video. However, I know that many of you are looking to apply for funding this year. So I hope that this is helpful. Step one to actually writing your research proposal is establishing a solid hook in the first paragraph. Now this hook can look like a variety of things. And what I recommend is actually asking your colleagues, your advisor, or fellow students to share a copy of their research proposal with you. Now you're not trying to copy the way that they structure their hook verbatim. But what you're looking for is a couple of different ideas, you may be able to find some sources online. However, I do recommend asking from somebody in your field of study, because they will have a better representation of what those types of proposals may look like. And what you're trying to do with the hook is get that initial interest grip. You're trying to make it that way the committee wants to keep reading and learn more about your project. And this can be something as simple as a general description of your project. But I also recommend using this as a way to lead the committee to further questions themselves. For example, in a research proposal that I wrote last year, I actually started with one of my case studies. So I discussed a girl that was living in the home of a lawmaker in late early modern England. And I discussed how this particular individual I felt was indicative of the closeness between black women's reproductive labor and the legal institutions that sought to control them. My project is about matrilineal descent and the law of slavery in the early modern English Atlantic. And because I'm a historian, I really like telling stories and developing a hook based on my primary sources is one of the primary methods that I use in my writing. But I've also written proposals where I just start with a general statement of what the project is. So you can go in a variety of different directions, but I do recommend looking at some examples as you're going and developing your hook just that way you see what others are doing and how it is that they tend to structure things. The second thing that you want to do in the first paragraph of your research proposal is immediately after the hook, identify the gap. To make it simple, what you're trying to do is identify what nobody has done so far. And this can be incredibly challenging. But first and foremost, you want to figure out what has been said in your field of study. And to do this, we can use research tools like Unriddle to help us out. Now, Unriddle is an AI tool used to speed up your literature review and research workflow. Unlike other AI tools that are just based on search, Unriddle is really about comparing and contrasting all of the different pieces of literature that are out there in your field of study in order to identify similarities and gaps. To begin, you're going to go ahead and populate PDFs of your sources. So this should be secondary literature material. So this means scholarship, including articles, book chapters, and any pieces of literature that you are able to cite in your field of study, you're gonna go ahead and populate all of those and upload it to Unriddle. From there, you can actually communicate with Unriddle in order to ask questions of the document. It also provides summaries and can even identify core quotes that it thinks might be helpful for your research. By identifying different sections in the text that it believes are most relevant to your research, you're going to be able to begin the process of comparing and contrasting. And as you go through this process, one recommendation that I have is going ahead and writing any questions that you have as you go. Now, this is something that happens at the very beginning of when you're developing your research question. And although you should already be at this stage when you're writing your research proposal, it is something that's important to continue returning to. As you're going through the literature, what is left unsaid? And what do you believe needs further clarification or needs further study? And thirdly, Unriddle is great for helping you actually write your literature reviews. Whether it's when you're preparing to write a proposal, you're working on a literature review for a paper, or it is that you're just trying to take notes, I do recommend trying to go ahead and summarize the text for yourself. And Unriddle will actually finish your sentences for you. One quick disclaimer, however, is that you should never submit any work that has been AI generated to a research proposal or as your own for a research project. But if you're looking to take notes for yourself and identify a summary of the text to help you better understand, then I do highly recommend tools like Unriddle. Unriddle is your AI research assistant to help offer clarity, speed up the process, and help you easily identify potential gaps in the literature. If you're interested in checking it out for your own workflow, then I'm going to have all of the links in the description below. Thank you so much to their team for sponsoring this video. Now I want to go ahead and highlight some specific tips for identifying a gap. Here are two things that I want you to keep in mind when you are looking to identify a gap in your research proposal. First and foremost, you want to keep this short and sweet. You do not want to belabor the point and you ideally want to identify specific authors. Secondly, you want to identify what it is you agree and disagree with in the way that the field has answered the question that you are trying to answer with your research. For example, my research intervenes in two very different scholarly discourses, and so I wanted to identify why it was that my project had the capability of getting these two discussions to overlap and offer answers that might not have been possible based on the questions that were asked in these different studies. So rather than only thinking about research that has directly identified the question that you were seeking to answer, you want to think about all of the tangential research that's been done and who it is that you think that you are in conversation with. And then the second thing that you want to keep in mind with this proposal and with identifying that gap in the literature is being incredibly direct about what your contribution seeks to be. As researchers, we are tasked with ensuring that others are aware of how important our research is. It's how we get funding, it's how we get support, it's how we get supervisors interested, and it's how we land jobs in the future. So this is the place to really be direct and specific about what it is that you hope to achieve. Now we get to the second part of the research proposal, and this can be a variety of different lengths of body paragraphs. Now the body of your research proposal is really looking to identify the methods, the sources of evidence, and how it is that you're actually going to go about performing the study. And depending on length, this can really vary. For my research proposals, I often used between two and three body paragraphs to identify the three methodological interventions I was seeking to make and why it is that I thought that they needed to take place within this study. Because I'm using a variety of different types of sources, I needed to be able to identify why those different sources were relevant. Because of the different fellowships that I was applying for, I needed to highlight different aspects of those interventions. Because if I, for example, was applying for a legal history fellowship, then I would highlight the chapters within my dissertation that I would like funding to support, which was specifically aligned with the legal history components of my research. But I was also applying for funding from programs that were really focused on British studies. And so then I was highlighting the parish records or the literature that I was citing. So depending on the actual funding that you are applying for, you're going to want to cater these paragraphs to that particular application. Now after you've written the bulk of the research proposal, it's time for the concluding paragraph. And this is where you really get yourself to stand out beyond your research. Because what you're trying to do is identify to the committee why that funding will be put to good use. And so we're going to break this into four parts. First and foremost, you're going to talk about the benefit of the funding to your research. So this can be a general statement about why this particular opportunity is going to be beneficial to you. Because anybody can say, for example, that this will buy me more time for my dissertation, or this will buy me more time in the archives, or this will buy me more time in the lab. But they want to know exactly how that time and money is going to be used. And so be direct. Part two of the conclusion is your timeline. So identifying how much time it will take for you to do certain aspects of the project. Some programs are going to ask for this in more depth or even in a separate document, but a general timeline is recommended. The third is more specific opportunities granted by that funding. So for example, there's an application to a fellowship at Cambridge. And this is an exchange program with my university. And it allows you to work with professors at Cambridge, it allows you to use their library sources and not only is the funding useful for buying you time, but it also gives you opportunity to engage in a different scholarly community, it gives you the opportunity to engage with other professors who may get to sit on your committee. So identifying other things that that funding may allow you to do is going to be another part of this process. And then number four, you want to end your statement with a sentence or two about how this funding will support your overall journey as an academic and your future research. Now we're moving on to part four of this video. And this is the CV or resume guidelines for funding applications. Now a standard CV is intended to highlight all of your academic achievements. And this can range between one to five pages depending on the funding application. The standard that I was asked for was three. I ended up taking off a pretty significant portion of my professional experience, I only kept the last five years or so of my professional experience in my CV, and really focused on highlighting my professional academic achievements. And this starts with your education. So all the different institutions that you've attended and the degrees that you have obtained, but also highlight your advisor and the proposed title of your dissertation or the title of any theses or research projects that you worked on during those degrees. So for example, it'll say that I graduated from UCLA in 2019. Below that it'll have the name of my thesis advisor and then my honors thesis title. The next piece is your professional experience. You don't have to have this on your CV. And some advisors may even recommend that you take it off. But this is something that I decided to keep on because I think it's something that's really important about my background. The next piece is publications. You can also include publications that are in the works or under review at the moment. And then you're going to move on to conferences. And conferences can include any that you have attended, spoken at, or have applied to. So even if you just submitted an abstract, you can, for example, say applied. You can also list any that you rejected that you didn't end up attending. For example, any conferences that were canceled due to COVID, you can go ahead and add that information in parentheticals. After that is awards. So any awards that you've received, including scholarships, but also academic awards, merit awards, things of that nature. And then you're going to go ahead and highlight organizations. So any organizations that you're a part of, any committees that you've sat on, any nonprofits that you've gotten involved in, any kind of service work, essentially. And then you're going to go ahead and end your CV by talking about skills. So this is primarily hard skills, especially for a CV. So this includes coding languages, foreign languages, technical skills, or anything of that nature. If you're looking for a CV template, I'm going to have one linked in the description below. It is cut, paste, easy. And you can also use this for when you go to apply for job applications, because it is CSV approved. And if you would like to check it out, it's below. Now onto the fifth section of the video, which is additional statements. And this includes things like leadership statements, abstracts, written samples, you name it. There are so many different things that you may be asked for within your funding applications. And the thing to keep in mind here, you need to use this as an opportunity to share different aspects of your project and of your person. When you're asked for an abstract, this is where you can be really direct about what that intervention is, because you just don't have the space. It's usually like 250 words. So you're not really going to be able to talk about who you're in conversation with or what the methodology is. This is really for identifying the problem and your ideal solution. When it comes to leadership statements, on the other hand, you want to think about your most important service experience. And this can be sitting on a committee within your department, it can be something that you've done extracurricularly. I actually wrote my leadership statement about this YouTube channel. I talked about how it is that I started creating YouTube content in order to share my experience as a graduate student who came from community college and navigating academia. And I just felt like this was the experience that has been the most influential in my life and in my research and in my work as a PhD student. I wrote my statement about how it is that this opportunity to create content has led to greater impacts in my field and greater interest in my research. It can be a variety of different things for you, but you want to identify what your most important service has been and what type of impact that has had. Some applications are going to ask for a cover letter and it doesn't usually come up unless it's a private research institution or you're applying for postdocs later on. So I don't have a lot of experience with this myself, I've only ever had to write one. So if anybody else has information about writing cover letters for funding applications that they would like to share in the comments, please go ahead and do. And when I have more information about how to go ahead and write those in the future, then I'll make a separate video. Now we're going to move on to quickly talk about letters of recommendation. Now letters of recommendation should come from your advisor or the person who is closest to you. And if, for example, they are on sabbatical and they are unable to support you for your applications, you're going to want to go to your second closest committee member or a professor that you can trust and that knows you really well. Give them ideally a minimum of six weeks notice. Professors are, as I'm sure you already know, overburdened. So you want to make sure that you're very clear about your expectations and what it is that you're applying for and what those deadlines are. And don't be scared to follow up because if I've learned anything in my time working with tenured academics, it's that your letter of recommendation is not the top of their priority list. And so because it's the top of your priority list, you need to make sure that it gets done and make sure that it gets done on time. I wish it wasn't our responsibility to have to chase professors all the time for these things, but that's just how it goes. So go ahead and make sure that you have a conversation with them, you make them aware of all the deadlines and things that you're applying for, ask for recommendations on how do you approach the application, and then make sure to follow up in advance of the actual deadline just to make sure that they get it in on time. Congratulations, we have reached the end of the video and you have all the information that you need, hopefully, to get started on your applications for funding so you can fund your research. And I can't wait to see how it is that it ends up for you. Make sure that you are applying widely because funding can be really competitive. So don't put your eggs in one basket, definitely apply to a range of fellowships because there are so many of them and even if it's just $500 or a thousand, these add up. So definitely go ahead, have a standard format for your application, use that to restructure for future applications and good luck applying for funding. And before we take off, thank you so much again to Unriddle for sponsoring today's video. If you want to go ahead and check out their AI tools for your research, I'm going to have a link in the description below. And if this video was helpful for you, then please remember to give it a thumbs up and hit the subscribe button for future academic and academic lifestyle content. I hope that you enjoyed this one, best of luck with your applications, and I will see you all in the next video. Bye friends. Bye.