A Dispatch from the First Focus Grant Bootcamp at ETH Zurich
26 February 2026
The beginning of February marked the inaugural Proposal-Writing Bootcamp, an integral part of ETH’s new Focus Grant programme co-financed by swissuniversities. Over the course of two months, sixteen Focus Grant recipients convene for three hours every Friday morning to review each other’s writing and exchange feedback. They also receive brief expert inputs from members of the ETH community on topics ranging from using figures effectively in grant proposals to establishing a writing practice and balancing proposal writing with core responsibilities.
A distinctive feature of the Bootcamp is that its participants share strikingly little in common. Beyond their career stage (all are postdoctoral researchers) and aspirations (to obtain independent funding in the near future), they hail from corners of ETH, such as Architecture and Health Sciences, that have discernably different ways of conducting research. This heterogeneity challenges participants to dispense with discipline-specific terminology and communicate the value of their research ideas to a broader scientific audience, a critical advantage in the pursuit of increasingly competitive research funding.
Beyond their career stage and aspirations, participants also share a commitment to providing feedback to one another that is grounded in prioritization, specificity, and respect. Learning to give useful feedback is a core tenet of the Bootcamp: it not only helps early career researchers develop into skilled mentors, but it also aligns with pedagogical research that suggests giving feedback can enhance a writer’s abilities even more than receiving feedback can.
So how is this put into practice—what actually happens in the Bootcamp?
During each session, participants provide feedback to one another using rubrics specifically designed around the expectations and common pitfalls of each major section of the proposal: state of the art, methods, and so forth. Because the participants are targeting various programs (SNSF Ambizione, SNSF and ERC Starting Grant), they also learn to tailor their feedback to the nuances of different funding schemes, the importance of which is emphasized in the input talk “shaping your writing according to the evaluation criteria,” by Dr Sonja Negovetic, Head of the Grants Office.
In small groups, Bootcamp participants give and receive feedback in a highly formalized process: after reading a specific section of the proposal for a predetermined amount of time, two reviewers give verbal feedback to the writer. The writer, meanwhile, remains silent as they absorb the feedback. Only after the reviewers have given five minutes of feedback can the writer initiate a discussion to clarify any of the points brought up by the reviewers. At first glance, this format may appear unnecessarily rigid, but it is designed to mimic the real review process, whereby—once the writer has submitted their final proposal—they can no longer defend or amend it, a point reinforced in the input talk by Uwe Sauer, Professor in D-BIOL and President of the ETH Research Commission.
It has been argued that “Writing a grant application is one of the more difficult things in the life of academic researchers and much harder than actually doing the proposed experiments” (Davies, 2005). For early-career researchers with comparatively little experience in seeking independent research funding and smaller networks to lean on for feedback and support, attaining third-party funding can be all the more arduous. Given the surge in submission rates and ensuing increase in competition among the flagship early career grants, giving postdoctoral researchers at ETH the opportunity to improve their proposals and thus increase their chances of success is more important than ever. But the Focus Grant Bootcamp aspires to do more: by bringing researchers together in person amidst a sea of loose papers and red-inked pens, the Bootcamp aims to make tangible a process that is often abstract and solitary and to foster a sense of community around it.
The Focus Grant Programme is part of the PgB Nachwuchsf?rderung from swissuniversities. The Bootcamp was inspired by a long-running program at Stanford University and adapted by the Grants Office for the European funding landscape, with the specific needs of the ETH postdoctoral community in mind.