Students who attend the boot camp receive feed-back on their own proposal writing and also offer the same to their fellow students. Participants are asked in advance to bring a draft of their opening paragraph or two of a fellowship proposal as the basis for discussion (with sufficient copies for all the participants).  To deal with group size, we may have a separate session for those in the humanities and social sciences, on the one hand, and another shorter session for the students in the natural sciences, on the other.

The topics and fields in the session for the humanities and social sciences are likely to cover a vast terrain -- geographically, chronologically, and methodologically.  By confining the discussion to opening paragraphs we will be able to achieve considerable focus.   An even more compelling reason for focusing on the openings is the simple wisdom that getting a proposal off to a good strong start is beneficial for what happens next - also applicable for the opening of a seminar paper, or a dissertation chapter.

As ambitious as all this sounds, our goals are in fact modest.  We hope that people will leave the session fired up to further refine their drafts, recognizing that writing a potentially winning fellowship proposal is no small or easy task.