Tonight was the due date for the final draft of my Downs Fellowship grant proposal. It's in. It's done. There are still a couple other funding sources I'm planning to apply to, but this is a HUGE step. And it feels soooooooo good to be done.
I had my consultations with the committee members. They brought up some significant points of concerns, but they were all things I'd thought about before. I had a Skype meeting with a few people from Family Health International (the organization I'm partnered with in Vietnam), and a long meeting with a researcher who works on injection drug use/HIV here at Yale about my questionnaire that I'm using as my primary research tool, and made some significant changes.
Then, today, while filling in various citations, I freaked myself out a bit. The project I want to do is little in some ways... and insanely huge in others. There are several people who I think I should contact about this research to get their insight... but they're UN officials! Basically, the work I want to do is something that only a few people are interested in, and for a while I was feeling less nervous because it felt like something that I thought was important but generally it would be okay if it kinda sputtered out and didn't produce any statistically significantly results. But that's seemingly less and less true. It's great in some ways - this could open a lot of doors for me as a researcher - but also incredibly daunting.
But I feel really good about where it's going. I might be totally heart broken if I don't get this particular grant, but at least I'm looking into other sources of funding, too. I REALLY want to make this project happen, go back to Vietnam, get to know the Hmong in the Northern highlands, and start to make a name for myself as a researcher.
One incredibly wonderful and important step in this process was that I recently heard back from a Canadian researcher who's done work with the Hmong in the area, but focused on cultural and geographical questions. I had emailed her back in December but hadn't heard anything and had just written that off as a lost connection. I was hoping to get advice about cultural sensitivity and Hmong translation from her, but since I hadn't heard anything, I was starting to look into other potential means of getting that information.
And then, about a week ago, I woke up to an email from her. I'd been doubtful that the project was actually going to work out, and her email gave me renewed hope. It's amazing how timing works perfectly sometimes. She gave me a list of suggestions about how to find a translator, things to think about, offered to contact her friends (Hmong people that she has worked with in the past and who have acted as translators for her), and to send me a chapter she wrote for a yet-unpublished book about the Hmong culture in the area. If this work happens and I get to publish it, she's definitely getting at least an acknowledgement. I'll be forever indebted to her.
So now I have to adapt the proposal to fit the next grant source, and wait on information about the INTERVIEWS for the Downs Fellowship (oh yes, it's an intense process), and before spring break rolls around I'll have an answer. I'll try not to have a heart attack from anxiety in the meantime.
Wish me luck!
Jen
