When I arrived at my tenure-track job bright-eyed and bushy tailed, I had absolutely no aspirations for grant work. The entire world of NSF, NIH, and others just seemed out of reach, mysterious, and downright scary. But then, in my first semester, a funny thing happened. I learned that my university provided competitive internal grant opportunities designed to serve as seed money for faculty research projects. With the full expectation of not being funded, I wrote up a 10-page proposal for a diversity course effectiveness study I was planning for the next semester. Much to my surprise (seriously, extreme surprise), I was awarded one of those internal grants to get started.
Of course I am not writing about this to chronicle my internal grant efforts. When I began thinking about some of the challenges early career SPSSI scholars face, the pursuit of grants must be one of the greatest unknowns we will encounter. Those of us in the academic realm face the confusion associated with exactly how grants fit into the promotion and tenure package. Do I have to pull in external grants in order to get tenure? Is it optional? No one knows!! Early career scholars in professional settings outside academia may feel grant pressure to secure their future employment. And that is even more stressful. The question for me is- where do we get the training for this?
For me, having some success with internal grants gave me the confidence to pursue my first external grant with NSF. I am still working on finding external grant success, but getting through the first submission made it easy for me to consider future NSF grant proposals. My advice to early career scholars is to check into possible internal grant opportunities. Not only will it give you some grant-writing experience, but it will also help you collect the necessary pilot data for your external grant. Even better- get to know the friendly people in your local Office of Sponsored Programs (or some other title for the research office). You might be surprised by all of the grant allies you will find hiding there!! During my own feeble attempt at NSF funding, I learned that there are people on campus that understand the federal grant application process who could support me through each hair-pulling stage. They already understood the NSF language, the forms, how to upload everything properly, and how to handle the budget request.
Considering my grant-writing experience at this point is still probably less than many graduate students, my main hope is that this blog post will inspire much discussion of your ideas about finding grant sources, making time to write the grant proposal, tricks and tips, or advice for early career grant-writing. While waiting for your comments, I will re-read my NSF reviews and hope that I have better luck next time!
As always, please send me any ideas you may have for future Early Career Scholar blog topics at caseki@uhcl.edu.
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7 comments:
Thanks for your insider's perspective, Kim. I'm wondering about the best sources of funding for early career scholars at teaching colleges & universities. Looking for ideas!
Kim, thanks for getting us started on this topic. I have yet to apply for NIH/NSF funding because I fear that my research is not very programmatic at this point. However, a friend (who has NSF funded projects) told me that isn't necessary to secure NSF funding. Does anyone out there have experience getting federal grant money for research that is still getting going?
One word of advice to follow up on Kim's is to make sure to get information on what exactly your Office of Sponsored Programs does and does not help with. I unknowingly spent 1/2 an hour making 5 copies of an external grant application, only to later find out that the office did that for me! I guess I was so used to being in the graduate student role that I didn't even realize they would help with such a task.
Division 2 STP has some grant funding opportunities for curriculum development, but I am not sure if they have anything to support research on teaching and learning. Perhaps there are private sources that support the scholarship of teaching and learning. I think Carnegie may have had such grants in the past and maybe they are still around?
Michele- that is a great point about finding out what types of support are available. I tend to assume I have to do it all myself and we really have to begin to change that mindset to make all of these new things possible.
At any rate, I liked some of the NIH cartoons on VADLO search engine!
I'm at a primary teaching institution and am applying for an NIH grant. When I spoke to my grants office, the representative almost seemed to be trying to dissuade me from applying..."we haven't been able to secure NIH funding before," "R01's are for primarily research institutions," "NIH grants usually take considerable time and many successive revisions..."
Does this type of response seem odd to anyone else? I'm applying for funding nonetheless however, am worried I won't get the administrative support I need.
That does sound discouraging. Maybe when YOU get the NIH grant it will start to change the culture at your institution. I would hope that once they see you are serious, maybe some of those comments will drop off. Do you have any colleagues there that can support you that may have gotten some sort of external grant before? I started working on my NSF grant by talking to someone else who had been successful (although in a completely different area.
Has anyone used a grant-writer to help you with a grant? My univ. hired one but she has no background in my field and that makes it really hard to believe she can do much to help me with it. Thoughts?
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