Notes from the session on "Perspectives on Grant Writing" a panel discussion with Ammon Kelly, Chris Hoadley, Brenda Bannon-Ritland, and two others I don’t know their last names (Cindy, Yasmine). This was a great session on Thursday night at the AECT Convention where a panel of folks who have received NSF grants discussed tips and advice for applying for NSF grant money.
Chris Hoadley’s six morals of grant writing.
1. persist and refine
2. ride the waves, you’re surfing
3. proposing is a dialogue that takes place on the timeline of 6 months to 2 years
4. keep a balanced portfolio. Don’t send everything to the same group
5. Keep your eyes on the horizon
6. Your proposal is not you nor your research agenda.
Ammon Kelly
Get a sense of who you are
Find out what area of technology you are interested in. The design? Diffusion? Integration?
Ask yourself if you know anything about assessment. Evidence-based research is the buzzword of the day. You will need to demonstrate with evidence that you have accomplished something.
You don’t need to have an entry in everyone of those diagrams, but you need to know where strengths are. Can you be part of a grant with someone else–an addendum with someone else’s grant.
The NSF Career Award is a good one to go up for because the pool of applicants are small, and they are the same level as you.
NSF website, top left=hand corner, go to awards. Go back to your concept map of your ideas and see if anyone gives a darn about your idea. Are they funding that? It may be a good idea, but it might not be fundable.
National academy of science should be one of your bookmarks. They do reports on everything. You can get a literature review and the hot topics very quickly from them. And many of the people doing that will maybe be on your panel reviewing your grant proposal.
Notes from the second session – invited symposium
I was permitted to sit and listen in on the symposium where the panelists worked with researchers in small groups. These are notes from the discussion with Yasmine.
– be a proposal reviewer so you can learn what people complain about and look for. Email the program officer and ask to do so, they often need reviewers and want a mix of older/younger folks
– Vitas in proposals should be 2-pages, and lead with the most important stuff
– Talk about prior funded research later in the proposal, not in the first page. Think about readability and the story you are telling
– make sure you have lots of good, relevant references. As a reviewer, she looks at the reference list. She looked over one list and remarked about a 1991 reference as being too old, so I guess you need to make sure to have lots of newer citations.
– the first 1.5 pages is an extended abstract. It should tell all of the important parts of your proposal.
Chris Hoadley
– to get on a review panel, have someone nominate you works better than volunteering, although you can do that. Have your advisor or someone who has received NSF funding to nominate you.
– Program officers can sometimes give a little bit of grant money without reviewers. Say for exploratory research. So it’s good to develop a connection with the program officer.
– There needs to be trust on that panel that they can trust you will be able to do the work. You can develop trust by having a famous co-PI, ideally someone who complements you but not similar to you. You can also do pilot studies sometimes with pilot study money (?) to show you can do the work. You can also try citing who they expect you will cite.
Great session, thanks to NSF for funding this symposium.
Tags: AECT2007, grant writing, NSF
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