Earlier this week, I found out that I will be receiving a grant to return to Costa Rica this year to do independent research! The lovely people at the Organization for Tropical Studies allowed me to apply for a graduate pilot grant, although I am not entering grad school just yet. After a few months of anxious waiting for the grant to be reviewed (the timing inconveniently overlapped with the transition between the spring and summer OTS courses, when many of the professors and administrative staff are extra busy), I was SO pleasantly surprised to find out that they decided to support my project.
Here is a quick recap of how I got to this point.
Basically, after doing a really cool independent project at Palo Verde station in northwest Costa Rica last spring (described in more detail here), my adviser suggested that, although the project was short-term, my group-mates write up our results and submit them for publication. Over the summer, my we worked hard on putting together our first-ever manuscript... while I think my biology training at Reed was first-rate, I have to say that publishing requires a whole different skill set than research itself. I am so glad that I had the opportunity to learn how to properly write up and submit a paper of sufficient quality for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. We got to learn valuable skills like writing within strict length, style, and formatting requirements, contacting and communicating professionally with journal editors, and selecting reviewers from the wide world of biology people, to name a few. Ultimately, our manuscript was rejected because of the limited nature of the study, BUT we got favorable comments from reviewers, which I was very proud of. As a group of three undergraduates (not to downplay the role of Susan, our adviser, who was SUPREMELY helpful... but, in the end, we did write it ourselves), we were told by experts in the field that our manuscript was well-written and compelling, and that our project was interesting, although not ready to publish just yet.
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| Me (far right), my classmates Owen and Rukhshana, and our adviser, Susan. Below: a snapshot of our manuscript, complete with official "For Peer Review Only" watermark. (Click to enlarge) |
So, despite our initial rejection, which came around Christmas-time, I was still pretty hung up on this project. While I agreed with the reviewers and the ultimate decision of the journal editors to not publish our first manuscript, I believed that this project was not only interesting and had potential to get results, but that it was truly something worth studying. Plus, as far as any of us can tell, a study like this is completely novel, which makes it even cooler. For these reasons, I was not ready to drop it just yet, and I started talking to my OTS adviser, Susan, about maybe turning our manuscript into a proposal and using it as a starting point instead of an end product. Ultimately, that's what we did, and I submitted my grant proposal to OTS a few days after turning in my senior thesis. If you can't imagine so already, that was a really exciting and exhausting time. But, with the weight of both major projects off my shoulders, I felt pretty great, and was happy to at least have given it a shot to continue my research with OTS, even if the grant didn't end up coming through. After all, there's always grad school, right?
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| A little snippet from my proposal |
In the mean time I'll be blogging about less exotic things... although I am beginning to realize that job hunting, leaving Reed, and experimenting with quasi-adulthood in the post-graduate world are all big adventures in their own ways.
P.S. Mom/Dad, if you are reading this, sorry for not telling you yet! I was going to wait and tell you in person this week when I see you...
