Morgan Gidding Summary And Analysis

The readings for this week consisted of reading chapters one through five of Morgan Giddings “4 Steps to Funding; Avoid Rejection and Get Your Grant Funded on the Next Try With This Simple Four Step Formula”. As the title states, Giddings’s work is about how to write grants in a way that will ensure the grant writer obtains funding. Giddings’s writing reads like an infomercial, and while it may seem silly at first, it makes valid points on how to write a grant. Giddings addresses the need for help that we as academics may be reluctant to seek, by providing an inanimate fountain of knowledge (Giddings, 2011). In chapter two, Giddings addresses inexperienced grant writers feelings of jadedness with the process of grant writing. Giddings states “The problem is that most …show more content…
That left my personal statement for the fellowship/grant as the source of rejection. I complained for a month about how unfair the system was, not wanting to consider my writing. Although I agree with the author that we must look at our own work to make sure it is appealing to those we are seeking funding from, I question whether we should consider the way in which the “system” plays a part in who learns how to write grants. If we look at grants as a form of social, symbolic, and cultural capital (Allan, 2011, pg. 421), we can see that only certain individuals ever have an early experience writing one. Grant writing is not something that most undergraduate students participate in. Even as graduate students, unless a grad student works on a grant with a professor, it is unlikely that it will be a familiar experience. Who are those that are able to navigate the experiences of having a close enough relationship with a professor to be able to join their project? In my experiences, it has been students who have the appropriate social and cultural capital who are asked to join a research project. If a