Grant deadline sprint
PhD students and postdocs with a fixed grant deadline and no time to babysit AI output. · Move from a blank specific-aims page to a submission-ready one-pager and defensible budget justification without losing your voice.
- A confirmed funder, call, and page limit
- A working bibliography in Zotero or similar
- Comfort drafting in your own voice — AI is a co-editor here, not the author
A submission-ready Specific Aims one-pager plus a budget justification with line-by-line rationale.
Finish every lesson and you should have: A submission-ready Specific Aims one-pager plus a budget justification with line-by-line rationale..
Pull the funder's review criteria, page limit, and formatting rules into a single working doc. Highlight the exact phrases reviewers grade against.
Write three aims yourself, one sentence each. Use Claude only to compress, not to invent.
Load your bibliography PDFs into NotebookLM and ask which aim is weakest and which prior work most threatens novelty.
Draft the budget in Overleaf or a spreadsheet, then ask ChatGPT to surface unexplained line items and missing fringe/indirect math.
Use Claude to roleplay a hostile reviewer against the one-pager and budget; capture every objection that lands.
You should now have: A submission-ready Specific Aims one-pager plus a budget justification with line-by-line rationale..
- Every aim and budget line can be mapped back to a named review criterion.
- A peer can read the aims aloud and tell which one is the keystone.
- Each aim has one named threat and one defensible response in your notes.
- Every line has a sentence saying why this amount, this year, this person.
- Every objection is either addressed in the doc or logged in a 'will not change' note.