Grant Writing 101

Is everyone's first grant writing experience not very fun?  I submitted my first grant just before winter break after two months of working on it.  I didn't know what to expect when I started the process, but it certainly didn't go as I planned.


I was trying to stick to the tips outlined by the Chronicle of Higher Education, the typical be concise, proof-read, have others proof-read, start early, know the grant agency, and so forth.  That didn't really happen.

My team (this ground was written by a group of four-ish) started about two months early, technically, but didn't really spend a lot of time working on it until the few weeks before the deadline.  This lead to a lot of last-minute changes and not a lot of proof-reading.  In fact, aside from the four of us reading it, only two outside people read the grant.

In terms of knowing the agency (the EPA in this case), my team looked through the accepted proposals for this grant from previous years trying to figure out if ours would be a good fit and what the agency was looking for.  In this regard I think we did well.

I think our proposal was concise, but I'm not very objective about it.  However, I'm not sure if the grant flowed together very well, I think you could tell that multiple people worked on it when it should really read as one author.  I'm glad the grant proposal didn't do the items from "How to Fail in Grant Writing," items such use lots of acronyms without defining them, or don't state goals/objectives/hypotheses.  That part of the grant was done correctly. 

I thought this was really interesting though:

63 percent of graduate students who did not receive a grant had only one to three people read their proposals. But 21 percent of the successful graduate students had seven or more people review their grant proposal before submission. Postdocs seemed to have recognized the importance of this strategy, as well, as 32 percent reported that four or more people had reviewed their proposal before submission.

- from Grant-Writing Tips for Graduate Students

Nice statistical evidence on the importance of having people read your grants before you submit.

The last piece of advice from the Chronicle's tip article was "don't take rejection too seriously."  I have yet to receive the official papers saying the proposal was rejected but I don't doubt they're on its way.  I'm lucky that I don't have to worry about funding at all but I wouldn't mind trying to apply for other grants in the future.  I can use all the practice I can get!