Through my earlier years, grants were just those mysterious things that your supervisors work on when they lock themselves in their offices for two weeks straight. Now I am reaching the exciting/scary stage of a scientific career, where I need develop independence in my work, both scientifically and financially. This means developing research ideas, and throwing my name in the hat to try and get some grant funding of my own.
In the last month I submitted two internal research seed grants, intended to give early career researchers a budget to develop a project. Instead of doing my actual job, gathering and analysing data on the project I am paid to work on, I have to sink a month into thinking about totally new, unique projects, and sell it to someone who has probably never even heard of a hoverfly. It is a strange time, because its only now that you realise basically everything you have ever worked on is the intellectual territory of your past or present supervisors. You have to come up with an idea that you are qualified to study based on your past experiences, but that is different enough from your past experiences that your old mentors don’t get mad at you for stealing their ideas.
In some bigger fields this is probably pretty easy, because there are thousands of people treading on each others toes already. People are a bit less touchy about their territory in a cancer or Alzheimers field because it is getting invaded by people all over the world every day. But in a niche field like insect vision, I find that peoples territory becomes rather large. In some insects broad neuron classes, or sometimes even entire regions of the nervous system, become the research territory of a single small lab. This makes finding your own research area pretty complicated.
But in the end, this grant writing exercise is good practice for the future. And if I am lucky enough to get some funding then I will get to buy some new toys and try some new techniques.