Proposals and Peer Reviews

Hello! this time I would like to write a bit about proposals and peer reviews (form a research perspective of course). Last week I had the privilege of writing a proposal and giving peer reviews to some of my fellow researchers. This was a part of one of my theoretical courses where we were taught how to write research proposals and to review them. Writing the research proposal is a pain in itself, but when you are asked to do it in 24 hours, it is surely going to get you addicted to caffeine and aspirin! I was paired up with my good friend Eogan (spelt as "Owen") from Ireland to undertake this colossal endeavor! Going through tens of hundreds of publications and articles to validate our proposal was just the beginning of the tedious task. As we neared nightfall, the proposal began to take shape and finally ended up doing a month's work in a mere time span of 24 hours. The peer reviews we received for our proposal was definitely beyond our expectations. The reviews were done by the other students attending the course hence it was truly a "peer" review. As the peer reviews (the real things) are supposed to be done by the competitors in the field. And the next agenda was to review someone else's proposal. Reviewing proposals isn't just criticizing whats claimed,but is as much a tasking procedure as writing a proposal. Each and every point in the proposal has to be checked and cross checked. And in the end, the proposal has to be checked for ingenuity and innovativeness. rating should be given fairly and the reviewer should not be biased in any way. Thus, the reviewers are given the proposals from authors who are unknown to them. I a span of 3 days, we had undergone a crash-course in proposal writing and peer reviewing which we thought, in the beginning, would be impossible. But not only did we accomplish that but also learnt a lot!