ORCA Grant
ORCA Grant
Have any of you had experience with ORCA grants?
Re: ORCA Grant
yeah. I didn't get one. I think they said they didn't think I had a good enough relationship with my mentor, which was crazy since we like met every week and shared stupid jokes and he gave me advice all the time (maybe I tried to make it look too professional to make up for it?).
Re: ORCA Grant
I actually applied for and got an ORCA grant, but then my life became so crazy busy that I didn't have enough time to do anything on the project, and I had to decline the funds right before they were going to mail me the check. If I'd had better organization, I think I would have done better.
Things I did that probably helped me to get the grant:
1. Chose a good mentor. She had recently been promoted from professorship to an administrative position, which probably didn't hurt, and she talked about grants she'd helped students apply for in the past, so I could tell she knew what she was talking about.
2. Chose a good research topic. My mentor is incredibly knowledgeable about the subject, and she pretty much knew that no research whatsoever had been performed on the topic we chose. (The topic was actually mostly her idea, too.) So, it seemed like the perfect thing to research (and I played it up that way in my proposal).
3. Wrote up a great project proposal. I'm a fairly good writer, so that helped, but once again, my mentor knew exactly what to say and not say.
So, as you can tell, having the right mentor was the main deciding factor for me. I'm still bummed about the project panning out--if I had been better-organized with my time, I might have been able to make it work, and it would have looked VERY VERY good on my resume. I might have even been able to present at a national conference! Grr.
But anyway, I hope that helped.
Things I did that probably helped me to get the grant:
1. Chose a good mentor. She had recently been promoted from professorship to an administrative position, which probably didn't hurt, and she talked about grants she'd helped students apply for in the past, so I could tell she knew what she was talking about.
2. Chose a good research topic. My mentor is incredibly knowledgeable about the subject, and she pretty much knew that no research whatsoever had been performed on the topic we chose. (The topic was actually mostly her idea, too.) So, it seemed like the perfect thing to research (and I played it up that way in my proposal).
3. Wrote up a great project proposal. I'm a fairly good writer, so that helped, but once again, my mentor knew exactly what to say and not say.
So, as you can tell, having the right mentor was the main deciding factor for me. I'm still bummed about the project panning out--if I had been better-organized with my time, I might have been able to make it work, and it would have looked VERY VERY good on my resume. I might have even been able to present at a national conference! Grr.
But anyway, I hope that helped.