I am going to go bold here and state for the record that writing a grant is the single most important undertaking you should devote yourself to during graduate study. Sure, developing and evaluating a testable hypothesis is what consumes most of your waking (and sometimes sleeping- gosh darn it!) hours. And even if you know from the get-go that academia just isn’t your thing, grant-writing is one of the most transferrable skills within science. Your grant is often the first place where you assemble your fledging preliminary data into a story. This process itself can give you important perspective on your work, as well as how science works overall by literally writing out your scientific method. All of this and more was recently made clear by Dr. Rick McGee , the mastermind behind the recent grant writing workshop I attended. Dr. McGee currently works as the Associate Dean for Faculty Recruitment and Professional Development at Northwestern University. He has devoted his life to understanding the development of young scientists, and presented some of his work on streamlining the grant-writing process at the workshop.
Probably the most poignant line from Dr. McGee’s talk was, “Writing proposals is not time away from science.” This was interesting because in my experience we talk about grant-writing as a period “away” from experimentation. In truth, a career in science integrates experimentation, grant-writing, publishing, and teaching. Yet, while taking time for your grant is not taking time away from your research, per-se, getting through said grant is nonetheless time-consuming. This was a key point of the presentation: manage your time so your grant becomes part of your job. Starting early can make this a seamless integration. I would recommend starting to compile preliminary data and outlining your aims six months from your target due date (with four of those months devoted to specific aims- as we will see later-on). This will give you enough time to get your ideas on paper, see what is missing in your story, perform one or two critical experiments, and finalize, finalize, finalize.
In your early start on grant-writing, Dr. McGee emphasizes focus on crafting the best specific aims you can. Many researchers approach the grant-writing process differently; they may for example, spend the most time on an elegant research strategy. Dr. McGee is of the camp that the research strategy will flow like a waterfall from the perfect pool of your specific aims. Since the impact score tracks very strongly with the approach score, refining an approach into a single page is the primary goal. Dr. McGee’s recommendation is to refine your aims through four months of rigorous group-editing. It is not a wild premise, as those aims will be the first thing your reviewers read. They will either turn the reviewer for or against you while they read the rest of your grant- and very little can be done to change a first impression (See, Figure 1: The Ideal Grant Review). Putting it another way, Dr. McGee sees your specific aims as THE chance to prove to reviewers that you are a legitimate member of the NIH-funded research community and that you belong.
It can take Dr. McGee up to four months to develop specific aims. Indeed, four months seems adequate when you learn that his grants go through a collaboration-heavy peer-editing process. During Dr. McGee’s workshops, students talk about the space between two sentences. That is, they think about what is missing in that space, and what you need to make the jump from what is currently accepted in the field and what you are proposing, for example. He uses recorders during these editing sessions to go back and understand what effect reading a sentence has on an audience, improving communication and clarity of thought.
For me, the length of time and collaborative approach required for a McGee-approved grant was less of a revelation. I learned early on in my college English classes that writing is a skill that can be learned and taught. Indeed, my best writing has always been born out of peer-editing projects. For Dr. McGee, it is important to recreate the type of reviewers you will likely get: the expert (a rarity, blessedly), the sophisticated non-expert, the skilled scientist who knows nothing, the technical expert, the non-expert that is still a scientist. All of these kinds of people can be found at a place like Rutgers; just look to your peers in and outside your department.
Figure 1: The Ideal Grant Review is an exercise in communication. Your goal is to get the reviewer to both understand and care about your proposed project; and likewise the grant reviewer starts out positive and hates to be confused by unclear thinking.
The group-editing process, while clearly effective, was a heated point of debate during the workshop: how can you get that kind of insight if no such group exists? A smattering of current resources available was suggested by the crowd, but they seemed not to satisfy the needs of our community. For example, one group that offered help with grants had plenty of non-experts, but no focused feedback. Though we may not have the luxury of accessing a group like this, in the end, it may be more important to the Rutgers community to be as available to your peers as you can be. For example, you can volunteer to read through a friend’s grant and offer genuine feedback; that is the start of precisely the kind of work that Dr. McGee does. Remember: the expert reviewer is a rarity. If you can get your friend in electro-physiology to understand your behavioral experiments, you have mastered Dr. McGee’s brand of interdisciplinary communication.
Having justified the impact of the specific aims, Dr. McGee wrapped up by giving us a “how to” based on his work with graduate students as well as professors. It turns out that for all the diversity of thinking in our various research fields, the grants we submit mimic each other. Essentially, after going through many specific aims, both funded and unfunded, Dr. McGee collaborated with a non-scientist communications expert, who found specific aims not-so-thrilling, but incredibly easy to understand. They found that the specific aims followed a formula. This is so much the case that Dr. McGee and his team have issued a sentence-by-sentence breakdown of the specific aims . Judging from the crowd, the formulaic approach to grant-writing was probably the most controversial part of the talk (Who knew grant-writing workshops could be so riveting?!).
Overall, I thought this workshop boiled down what it meant to compose and be one with the grant-writing process. It also turned grant-writing from a thing that you are either good, or not good, at into a skill that can and will be refined. Let me know in the comments if you agree or disagree!
The resources featured in the talk are available online, as part of Northwestern’s CLIMB resources, can be accessed through the Rutgers ResearchPortal.