4. Writing an expedition proposal for the Expeditions Council
| If you want your expedition to be considered for approval as an Oxford University Expedition, you need to submit 14 copies of an Expedition Proposal to the Secretary of the Expeditions Council, c/o the University Offices in Wellington Square, usually in 6th Week of Michaelmas Term.
Details of next year’s submission deadline will be up in Michaelmas 2008. n.b. late proposals won’t be accepted by the University, so please get yours in on time! |
The Secretary of the Expeditions Council is Caroline Rushworth, who works in the International Office in the central University Offices, which are housed in the large concrete building on Wellington Square (south side of Little Clarendon Street).
Your expedition proposal should explain where you want to go, what you want to do, why you want to do it, how you’re going to do it, why it’s important, who you are, how you are going to raise the money, how you’re going to spend it, when you’ll be in the field, and how you’ll make sure you take care of yourselves.
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A good format for expedition proposals is set out and explained below. Do take care that the document you produce is called “Proposed Expedition to …”, and not “Oxford University Expedition to …”. It is up to the Expeditions Council to decide if you will be an Oxford University expedition!
Abstract
Contents
Aims
Background
Scientific methods
Timing of expedition and provisional itinerary
Justification
Personnel
Budget
Proposed sources of income
Logistics
Health & Safety
References & Acknowledgements
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Abstract
The Abstract should just give a brief, 100-200 word summary of where you plan to go, what research you plan to do, and when you plan to go there.
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Contents
Contents, obviously, lists where you find everything else in your proposal.
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Aims
Ideally you should set out a brief, clear statement of the aim or aims of your expedition. If you want to do two or more things, say, survey the frogs of a valley system in the Usambara mountains and write a field guide to them for use by local people, then you should make clear which of these aims is more important, or if they are all equally important.
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Background
You should give a brief background to the research you plan to do. If you want to work on vulture ecology, you should demonstrate a basic familiarity with what a vulture is, and with previous relevant work. If you want to work on Philippine lizards, you should explain the gaps in our current state of knowledge of Philippine lizards. As much as anything else, this section is to show the Expeditions Council that you do know what you are talking about. The background section should include clear maps of where you are going: go to the Bodleian Map Room in the New Bodleian (first floor, opposite the King’s Arms) if you have difficulty obtaining relevant maps. Make sure it’s safe to go where you want to go: the University will not approve expeditions going to countries or parts of countries which the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office deems unsafe for British nationals. You can access a list that was correct on 30 October 2003 here, but you should check the FCO website for more up-to-date information.
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Scientific Methods
The section on scientific methods is very important: most expeditions that have trouble getting approved have trouble with this aspect of expedition planning. The best general advice is to talk to people who have done the sort of research you plan to do, or to read a few scientific papers that cover the sort of research you intend to do, and make sure that you understand and can explain the methodology, and that it is practicable for a group of undergraduates to carry out in seven weeks or so.
If you lack relevant experience, this needn’t be a problem at all, as plenty of training courses are available in, for example, making herbarium specimens and insect trapping techniques (see the RGS Expedition Advisory Centre website for details). You should make clear, if appropriate, that you either have the appropriate skills or intend to acquire them before you go.
If you need, say, a bird-netting licence or qualification, make clear either that you have one (if you have one) or that you or another member of the expedition is training to get one. If you’ll be collecting insects or plants, you should talk, at an early stage, to George McGavin, who is the Assistant Curator of the Entomological Collections at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, or to Stephen Harris, who is Curator of the Oxford University Herbaria in the Department of Plant Sciences. Both have worked all over the world, and both sit on the Expeditions Council. If your work will require research permits, special visas, collection permits, or CITES export and import permits, you should make this clear, and demonstrate that you know whom you should contact (for endangered species, which may be covered by the CITES legislation, check http://www.ukcites.gov.uk/).
But if there is no way you could acquire the necessary skills in time, then you need to think hard about whether your research will actually be possible. One way that it can be possible is to work with local scientists and local students, but that may involve additional complications: have you thought through all the options for your research?
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Timing
You should be clear about when your expedition will be, for example, 22 July to 19 September, or 5 December to 8 January (winter expeditions are unusual, but do happen from time to time - if you’re thinking of one, you need to apply to the Expeditions Council a full year in advance). The dates need not be fixed in stone, but should be indicative of approximate dates. It’s worth noting that flight tickets these days are often booked up months in advance, and that the earlier you book your flights the cheaper they are likely to be.
As well as the chronological time, make sure you know, and have thought about, what season it will be where you are going. For example, in the southwest Pacific most plants flower in the rainy season, from November to March, but at that time of year the roads are often impassable, mosquitoes are everywhere, and cyclones are common. Will it be safe to travel and work at the time you are going? A good source of information on climate and natural hazards is the CIA World Factbook, which has all manner of information on every country and territory in the world. And of course, Lonely Planet guidebooks usually provide this sort of helpful information.
You also need to provide a rough itinerary of your expedition. Again, the precise dates can change but you should show that you have thought about such issues as the amount of time you’ll need to spend in cities at the beginning and end, and how much of your time you’ll actually be spending in the field. You should spend at least six weeks actually in the field, unless you have a very good reason not to: otherwise the University may be reluctant to grant approval.
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Justification
You should include a justification of the work you intend to do. Why is it important? Why is it interesting? Who will see the information you generate? For example, if you were wanted to work on bat ecology in the Marianas Islands, you’d need to explain why bats play an important role, why they have been understudied with respect to whatever you intend to study about them, why bat ecology is important to our understanding of the Marianas Islands, and which conservation authorities you’ll be working with and why they might be interested in your findings. Crucially, you also need to think about what an undergraduate expedition is: it’s basically cheap, scientifically literate labour. Explain why the project you have in mind would be well-suited to being carried out by your team, and why it’s a good use of the workforce that your expedition represents.
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Personnel
You need to explain who you are. This has three components: how many of you there are, who’s doing what, and how you are qualified to do it.
Typically, expeditions comprise three to six people. Expeditions containing only two people tend to be encouraged to expand, solo expeditions are very rarely approved, and larger expeditions can find it difficult to raise all the funds they need. Very often, expeditions have not finished assembling their team when they apply for approval and write their proposal - this needn’t be a problem. If you think that you need four people to do the work you propose to do, and you only have three of you, simply explain that you’re still looking for someone who speaks fluent Spanish, or who can identify plants, or who just is interested, and that you hope to fill the vacancy before too long.
All Expeditions need a leader, and the University requires that there be only one leader, and that there also be a treasurer and a medical officer. The expedition leader has particular responsibilities to the University for the administration and responsible conduct of the expedition, and is ultimately responsible for everything done in the name of the Expedition. He or she normally does most of the non-financial administration (and filling in grant applications) before the expedition. The treasurer should ideally be somebody who can count, but there are no other necessary qualifications. The Medical Officer needn’t know anything about medicine, but should be prepared to go on a Wilderness Medical Training course (such as those at http://www.wildernessmedicaltraining.co.uk/) to familiarize him or herself with the basics of expedition medicine and first aid. OUFAU, the Oxford University First Aid Unit, can provide advice.
Depending on the nature of the expedition, you may want to appoint other expedition members, informally, to particular roles - photographer, site-manager, driver, technical expert, translator are all relatively common.
Your personnel section should also include a brief statement of who you are and what relevant experience you have. It’s usually enough to put something like the paragraph below for each member of the expedition.
James Smith
St Anne’s College, 2nd year Biological Sciences undergraduate.
Expedition treasurer.
James has interests in conservation and especially in ornithology. He has extensive field experience, including conservation work, in the UK. He spent part of this summer bird-ringing in California, and speaks a little Spanish. He will be 21 at the time of the expedition.
If you’ve never been to the Tropics, or never left Europe, don’t worry! Neither had most members of the OUEC committee before their first expedition. Having said that, it’s usually a good idea to have someone on the expedition with previous experience of developing countries, and also at least one person who speaks the local language reasonably well. If you get University approval, you can sometimes get on to language courses at the University’s Language Centre on the Woodstock Road as a priority case. Also if, you’ve never crossed the English Channel, but spend every summer for the last three years hiking for a fortnight across Scotland and sleeping in a tent in the middle of nowhere, mention it: it’s a far more useful experience, so far as being on an expedition to somewhere remote is concerned, than is a gap-year knowledge of the world centred on tropical beach resorts on the backpacker trail.
Expeditions also need to appoint a Home Agent and a Field Agent. The Home Agent must be a member of Congregation, which is the name given to body comprising all of the University’s permanent academic staff and senior administrators, but not postdocs or other research staff here on short contracts. Ask an academic working in the relevant field if they’d be prepared to act as your Home Agent (they may wish to have a look at the Expeditions Council’s Rules, available by clicking here). The University publishes an annual register of the membership of Congregation in the University Gazette, which is available online here (correct as at February 2003) for you to check that the Home Agent you have in mind is a member of Congregation.
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Budget
Money. Has to be mentioned somewhere. Your budget should consist of an itemized list of expenditures, covering everything from administration costs (the price of printing ten copies of the proposal, and stamps and envelopes for grant applications, soon adds up), airfares, living costs (per person per day - these can usually be estimated from the Lonely Planet figures by reducing them to reflect (a) the fact that most of the time you will not be staying in a hotel or hostel, and (b) economies of scale that come from cooking for four or five people. A typical budget might look something like this: the numbers are made up but not implausible.
| BREAKDOWN OF EXPENSES | CALCULATION | COST |
| Airfares, London-Brasilia for 4 people: | £800 × 4 | £3200 |
| Car hire for 7 weeks | £100 × 7 | £700 |
| Tent, sleeping bags, mosquito net, etc. | £400 | |
| Equipment: camera, tree-ring painting liquid, Madalski presses, herbarium flimsies and drying paper, clinometer, laptop batteries, etc. | £500 | |
| Living costs (food, accommodation, water, tent-space hire when appropriate, petrol) calculated at c. £12/person/day | £12 × 4 × 7 | £336 |
| Medical kit, including mosquito repellent, plus First aid training (check current costs with OUFAU,contact details at www.oufau.org) | £200 + £300 | £500 |
| Travel insurance (University scheme, 2 month period cover per person, plus expedition equipment cover to £2500) | £35 × 4, + £15 | £155 |
| OUEC Expedition Bulletin publication costs | £200 | |
| Pre-expedition administration and fund-raising | £150 | |
| Post-expedition administration, including circulation of detailed reports to sponsors | £350 | |
| Herbarium specimen packing and shipping costs back to UK | £120 | |
| Subtotal | £6611 | |
| Contingency funding | 10%of subtotal | £661.10 |
| GRAND TOTAL | £7272.10 |
Proposed sources of income
Of course, to spend money, you need to have been raising money. You should therefore explain where you’ll be applying for money. The University will usually give you a little bit. They don’t always, though, and (because most of the money that they can spend for this purpose comes from trust funds) the amount they give is a function of (a) how the stock market did last year, and (b) how many expeditions are going out that year - if you are one of ten expeditions, you’ll get roughly half what you might if you were one of five. In any case, even if you have university funding, it doesn’t go very far, and some of it is tied to making sure you get proper first-aid training. You’ll therefore need to think about applying to charities, companies, and learned societies for money: visit the funding page of our website for more details.Explain which organizations or schemes you have applied to already, or will shortly be applying to. Draw attention to any specialist organizations you think might be able to assist you - the Bat Conservation Trust if you work on bats, the International Dendrology Society if you work on temperate trees. Be realistic. The Royal Geographical Society are unlikely to give you their maximum grant: they’ll give you a medium sized grant if you write a good application form. Equally, a charity that hands out large grants to work on UK badger conservation is unlikely to be interested in funding the study of spiders on Aldabra, or of trees in Melanesia.You should also be prepared to make a contribution yourself. As a minimum, the Expeditions Council will expect you to pay towards the expedition the amount you would spend in accommodation and food costs for an equivalent period of time spent in Oxford: they are not interested in subsidizing you personally. Personal contributions are usually of the order of £500 - £600 per person, and that’s not including any travel bursaries that your college may be able to grant to you, which should be additional to that figure. Often, expeditions in need of cash organize parties, musical events, even raffles and slave auctions. Ask OUEC committee members what has been successful recently.
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Logistics
Logistics are what usually end up giving Expedition Leaders mild headaches. You need to think about transport, visas, passports and working conditions. If you’ll be working in a rain forest, how are you getting there? If you want to study a particular species of tree, are you sure you can identify it? You may well discover that one of the Expeditions Council knows far more about it than you do, so make sure you convey both what you know and your awareness of what you have yet to learn.How much does it cost to hire a car? How reliable are local vehicles? How good are the roads? If you can avoid driving, do so - ideally hire a driver if you really must have your own transport, or investigate the possibility of being put in to your research site by helicopter. Bear in mind that most people from the UK who die in the tropics are not squashed by elephants, eaten by crocodiles or fed to lions: they die in car accidents or contract malaria. The University’s Expeditions Council now tends not not to let students drive themselves overseas.
You’ll need to make sure everyone has at least six months of passsport validity left after the end of their intended stay - some countries may refuse you entry otherwise. Find out at an early stage whether you need visas for the length of time you are planning to stay, and set about getting them. If your flight stops off anywhere, check whether you need a visa for the stop-off country. If there are separate tourist visas and research visas, make sure you get a research visa: doing things properly, by the book, all the way through minimizes the chance of things going horribly wrong.
If you’ll be working with scientists or students from your host country, do you speak their language? Do they speak your language? All these may seem far too many things to be concerned with at such an early stage, but the important thing is to start thinking about the questions, rather than necessarily to have all the answers.
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Health and Safety
Health and safety has become an increasingly important part of expedition planning. At the proposal stage, you needn’t worry too much as you’ll get plenty of advice and help from OUFAU, but you should demonstrate that you have thought about the issues. What diseases might you encounter? Is prophylaxis available? What is the cure if you get infected? Make clear that you will of course be talking to the University Occupational Health Service to get up-to-date professional advice. From a safety point of view, use your common sense. If you propose to count crocodiles by swimming with them you are unlikely to be the darling of the University Safety Officer. If you are doing anything remotely dangerous (including diving and driving), have you been trained? Do you have qualifications? What will you do if someone falls over and breaks a leg? If you will be somewhere very remote, what will your procedure for getting injured people to hospital be? Will you take a satellite phone? If you are doing marine biology research, where is the nearest decompression chamber? How would you get there?
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References
Finally, you should include a bibliography, with references for all the books and articles you have used in preparing your report, and you should acknowledge any help you have received or advice you have been given which you have acted upon - as much as anything else, this may serve to reassure people that you are in capable hands!
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Examples
To give you an idea of what an Expedition proposal should look like, have a look at one from the last couple of years. As an example, you can download the proposal (successfully approved) for an expedition to New Caledonia from a few years ago: note that the maps were much higher resolution in the original!.
PDF format: Proposed Expedition: The Conifers of New Caledonia
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OUEC is here to help, so if you have any queries or problems with any of the above, or any suggestions to improve this brief guide, then please do e-mail us, at ouec@herald.ox.ac.uk, and we’ll try and help.
