Welcome and thank you for joining me on this adventure. For the newbies, you can catch up on previous post: first blog post, second blog post here, third blog post here, fourth blog post here, fifth post here, sixth post here and the seventh post here.

This week was ‘easy’! It didn’t take much for me to improve on the ‘Cos 90’ outcome from last week. I only need to write a single sentence or paragraph on the research proposal and that would have been a great improvement. Did I make progress? Yes, but in a roundabout kind of way. Already some weeks ago, I had settled on the structure of the research proposal in terms of the team, case study selection and the overall research design. In fact the research questions and approach were aligned the money – i.e. with how many personnel I was going to recruit for the project, what would be left for fieldwork and for research impact, etc. I had based these decision and calculations on the budget format from last week. It was already tight and cutting it thin with the budget allocation but it felt feasible.

Guess what happened earlier this week? All the neatly laid out plans and dreams just flew out of the window!

Why? Well, because the new budget tables and format arrived! Suddenly, a PhD student is costing an arm and a leg. The dream of having 2 PhD students in addition to some student assistants was now financially unviable. Then it really become about the money, money, money! How to divide up the 850,000 euros of the grant in a way that allows me to keep my research dream intact? This wasn’t how I had hope to approach proposal writing goals for this week. But what could I do?

After staying in the frustration and pulling my hairs a bit, I went back to the drawing board. Rejiggling numbers here and there, rethinking my thoughts about the research questions, dreaming afresh amidst constrains and arriving at a set up that stays true to my original research ideas while finding a way to get things done. It helped that I could also deal with the frustration by focusing on writing out little bits of the research proposal. Now, I plan to do more of the (qualitative) research myself while saving the bulk of the quantitative research to the 1 PhD student I can afford. This leaves budgetary room to cover fieldwork, provide educational training to the student and myself and also a good amount to undertake societal impact activities.

The two songs that served as background to my frustration and writing activities are these: – ‘Price Tag’ by Jessie J (ft. B.o.B) and ‘Money, Money, Money’ by ABBA. Enjoy with me…

At the end of Week 7, I feel very satisfied with the progress I have made with the research proposal this week. I have thought thoughts, made handwritten notes in my special A4 Notebook and have typed a big chunk of text – some good, some bad and some very terrible. But the key has been getting into the flow of writing and putting text together that can be edited and refined later. The other news from this week (actually just yesterday), is that I received the official decision letter from the NWO. This is the formal and official confirmation that I made it through the pre-proposal stage and have been invited to develop and submit a full proposal. The official letter include the scores and a summary of review feedback/comments on my pre-proposal. I still need to sit with that information for a bit. I might have digested it enough to reflect on it in next week’s blog post.

Goals for Week 6: Next week’s goal is to keep writing and arrive at a ‘respectable’ first “word vomit” rough draft of the research proposal. There is an internal university deadline of 10 March for draft submissions in order to receive feedback. This is my target and I hope to make it in time….otherwise I will have to seek additional feedback elsewhere.

The adventure continues…see you next week Friday for the next instalment of the #NWOVididiaries blog post.