Last year I was one of the lucky PhD-students who visited the PCDI retreat in wonderful surroundings of Heeze…trying to broaden my scope as a scientist and plan my future career, I left my hometown Groningen for a few days 'abroad'.
It seems strange, but changing my surroundings already cleared my mind and forced me to think about other things than my lab work. I was determined: these three days in Heeze were dedicated to me and my future only! Many workshops, presentations, discussions and meet-and-greets confirmed my thoughts: my future lies within the academia.
During this period I initiated the next step within my career: applying for a postdoctoral position in the USA. My blog deals with many things PhD-students and postdocs deal with; working in the academic world, career planning and issues, job interviews, working abroad, and many other subjects.
From April 2010 I will live in Philadelphia where I will work as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. In my blog I will continue to write about this new adventure and experience of working abroad as a postdoctoral fellow.
How to write a grant proposal
26 June 2010
posted by Sabina
One of the workshops during the PCDI retreat was dedicated to this subject. It all seemed so easy to me at that time, but now I actually have to bring this to practice and I have only few more weeks left to do this. First I have to think about the subject, write it down on less than 10 pages, try to make it attractive to the broader audience, novel, reliable, achievable….this is going to be a huge challenge I guess.
This truely has been the number one question for most of you scientists around the world… We are desperate 'to know'… 'to find out'… 'to identify the underlying mechanism'… but most of all 'we must publish or perish'.
At the moment I just started my first post doc job and again the same question arised: What is the best option in order to find a proper faculty position in a university and to get the grant proposals honoured: to publish more papers in the lower impact factor journals? Or shall we put in all the effort, everything there is to finaly get that one, sky-high Nature paper??
One of the things I missed during my search for a perfect PhD-position in the Netherlands was that I always felt like there was no choice for me….actually I did not really have a choice…and that goes for almost everybody I know… It is rather that you just stay at the department where you have performed you Master internship than you do your PhD or that you just apply for an available position due to an ad placed by the department on the Nature.jobs or Academic.transfer website…
One of the 
One of the things I missed during my search for a perfect PhD-position in the Netherlands was that I always felt like there was no choice for me….actually I did not really have a choice…and that goes for almost everybody I know… It is rather that you just stay at the department where you have performed you Master internship than you do your PhD or that you just apply for an available position due to an ad placed by the department on the