You read that title correctly - 140 characters (including spaces!). Why only so many characters? Because my grant proposal was submitted on Twitter - 140 characters is the maximum length of a tweet. I almost exclusively tweet about new blog posts, but I have yet to unlock the full potential of Twitter Sci Comm. Luckily, the Mindlin Foundation provided an excellent opportunity to branch out a bit from my typical tweets. |
The folks at the Mindlin Foundation put together a funding opportunity for education, science, and engineering that they've dubbed One Tweet, One Percent. To use their words, "The 1% Microgrant is intended to support 1% of a single investigator’s salary for a single year, approximately 20-30 hours, or an equivalent dollar amount to cover materials and other expenses for a project of roughly that duration". As long as you met their eligibility requirements, you could tweet them your grant proposal and potentially be selected as one of five people to submit a 500-word full proposal. One of those five people is then awarded up to $4,000 for their project.
The Mindlin Foundation received 162 preapplications within 24 hours, and I encourage you to go check them out because some of them are super creative and/or a pretty awesome idea. I got my entire lab involved for my tweet, which went through quite a few revisions despite the brevity of such an application. I posted this to the funding channel on the Perry lab Slack (AKA our organized instant messaging/data sharing system):
For the record, I generally dislike emojis on every platform other than our lab Slack. Everyone who voted 'ant' had decided that the first tweet format felt a little less catchy than the second. But PJ made an excellent point: not everyone knows what a GWAS is. While such an abbreviation would've been nice in regards to keeping the application tweet-sized, this particular tweet needed to be easily understood to be effective. So with a bit of tweaking, and a second round of voting from my lovely lab mates, this was what I ended up tweeting to the Mindlin Foundation:
Whatcha think? We were going to involve some Taylor Swift references, but decided against it in the end - the lizards shake the ants off haha. If you don't get the joke, please click this link. If you do get the joke and/or don't want to get this song stuck in your head for the next two weeks, please do not click that last link.
Hopefully I'll hear back from the Mindlin Foundation within a couple of weeks. In the meantime, keep your fingers crossed for me :) Cheers!