Proposal Advice: Experiential Advice Focused For New Faculty

At the 2009 ASEE annual meeting, the New Engineering Educators Division and the Engineering Research Council jointly sponsored a session entitled, “2575: Funding Sources for Engineering Research.” The author was one of the panelists invited to participate as the token faculty member just having earned tenure with both educational and research funding and publications. The author / panelist gave a talk on “Proposal Advice: Experiential Advice” which included a Top 10 list of Do’s & Don’ts to Earn Competitive Funding as a New Professor. The feedback from this presentation and subsequent discussion was positive and is reproduced here in a format accessible for all new engineering educators. The advice provided is applicable to faculty writing proposals for educational research as well as scientific / engineering research. The primary focus is on competitive funding where experts and peers in the field evaluate the merits of the proposed idea and that feedback is provided to the proposer. Advice and strategies are outlined for working through rough periods and improving ideas and proposals to the level they are funded. While the perspectives provided are from one person’s experiences and not officially endorsed by any funding agency, they are focused to provide encouraging and tangible advice on how new faculty can approach writing their first proposals and get them funded. Introduction and Brief Background of the Author A key mentor (my mother) told me as I was growing up, “You don’t know what you don’t know until you do know what you didn’t know.” This is apparently a slight misquote from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice's Adventures in Wonderland’, but wise nonetheless. The issue is that when one doesn’t know what they don’t know, they also don’t know what questions to ask or who to ask them of to find the answers they need to move forward. This is extremely true of beginning assistant professors in academia. While there are some necessary commonalities that will earn a person tenure at most schools (publish, get funding, publish), the playing field is different at each institution. This paper seeks to provide the proposal writing advice I wish I had as I transitioned from being a freshly graduated PhD to a tenured Associate Professor. I began as Assistant Professor in August 2003 at Mississippi State University after having defended my Ph.D. in July 2003 at the University of Notre Dame. I had read many of the new faculty advice books and was determined to be a ‘quick starter’. I volunteered for entirely too many service activities, designed graduate recruiting brochures and other activities, all of which yielded positive feedback from my colleagues, but no real tangible measurable credentials to help my annual reviews and thus earn tenure. In retrospect, I was intimidated by writing research proposals, didn’t exactly know how to structure a proposal and lacked confidence that my ideas were good. During that first year, I only tried for smaller proposals and never stuck my neck out very far. When I got negative reviews, I felt devastated and defeated. Just as students sometimes allow grades to reflect their self-worth, I was letting feedback tell me I wasn’t good or worthy of the job. As a new faculty member, maybe the baggage that holds you back is a little different, but a P ge 15005.2 Proceedings of the 2010 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright @ 2010, American Society for Engineering Education key change needs to occur that allows you to view the proposal writing process as an iterative game which in most cases yields stronger, better conceived, more scientifically solid research ideas. The whole process is a fun challenge that you sometimes win and when you lose, there is so much to learn from it – and after all, isn’t continual learning one of the attributes that drew us into academia? Now, why do I feel qualified to write this paper 6 1⁄2 years later? To be honest, I still battle that imposter syndrome. However, I earned tenure / promotion to Associate Professor in August 2009 and was recruited heavily by a new institution with an offer that could not be refused, so moved there as an Associate Professor starting January 2010. I earned a CAREER Award in 2007 as well as new faculty awards from Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU), ASEE’s Southeast section, Outstanding Paper Awards, Academy of Distinguished Teachers, and my students have earned over 18 awards in research. I’ve been invited to write perspective articles, had my research featured on the cover of a journal, invited to write book chapters, and my group’s publications are being cited more each day. Since 2003, I’ve helped secure a total of $2,149,859 in both research and educational funding. Most funding has come from the National Science Foundation. I submitted (as a co-PI) my first proposal in summer 2004. I was a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) site proposal and was funded in December 2004. Batting 1000 is not typical, but the PI and I spent the entire summer planning and writing the proposal. It was so polished and had been internally reviewed by so many people that I now understand that is the minimum that new faculty need to target. I then had a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) funded in 2006 (NOTE: these are now Grants for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) and EArly-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER)). My second submission of the CAREER award was funded in 2007 (plus 5 supplements), and a Course, Curriculum, and Lab Improvement (CCLI) proposal (NOTE: these are now Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (TUES)) was funded in 2008 / 2009. A small equipment proposal was funded in 2009 followed by a larger Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) proposal in 2009. The very first proposal I ever had funded was in late 2003 and was USDA funding via a State Agency. The whole opportunity arose from a collaborative contact made during a university trip. Additionally, my group received non-competitive (congressionally mandated) funding from DOE’s Sustainable Energy Research Center at Mississippi State University. A small amount of funding came from the National Institutes of Health to fund a special symposium for 2 years, but this is a major area where I need to focus writing proposals. Miscellaneous funding has included ORAU, a Research Initiation Proposal, National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) REU, and Academy of Applied Science. The list of not funded proposals is much, much longer. It includes multiple submissions to the NSF, DOE, DARPA, NASA, American Meat Association (AMA), National Academies Keck Futures Initiative, Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, Sun Grant (Tri-state initiative), Sloan Foundation, Life Sciences Biotechnology Institute (LSBI) and others. Some of these ideas have been recycled, improved and eventually received funding. Each submission has been a learning experience and I haven’t found a greater sense of accomplishment than when the submit button is finally hit. All these experiences have led to the following Top 10 list of Do’s & Don’ts to Earn Competitive Funding as a New Professor. The advice provided is applicable to faculty writing P ge 15005.3 Proceedings of the 2010 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright @ 2010, American Society for Engineering Education proposals for educational research as well as scientific / engineering research and is written to be accessible to all new engineering educators. The overarching message is intended to be a positive one that empowers the new faculty to utilize feedback and grow to secure the funding they seek. The perspectives provided are from one person’s experiences and not officially endorsed by any funding agency. The goal is to provide encouraging and tangible advice on how new faculty can approach writing their first proposals and get them funded. The Top Ten Do’s & Don’ts to Earn Competitive Funding as a New Professor #1: Do over prepare the project idea and proposal Preparation is essential. Do an extensive literature search and include it in the proposal. This demonstrates your command of the field and allows you to contextualize your own new, novel idea within the field. It is important to directly state how your proposed idea will contribute to the knowledge in the field. Write frequently on the proposal, revise what you wrote as new sections are added, and write some more. The goal is to produce a well-written, informative, and easy to read research (education) plan that is easily understood by an expert in your field as well as by someone tangentially related to your field. #1: Don’t assume connections between concepts are apparent A common mistake when writing is to talk around a main point by saying why it is important and what information will be attained without explicitly saying what you are doing. This is so important that it should actually be repeated in a couple of places in the proposal. It is important to organize carefully to reiterate important points and to directly tell the readers that it is related to another aspect of the proposal and how. The rule of thumb I use is to state important ideas in the introduction, expand on them in the body, and restate them at the end of the proposal, either in a timeline or in a concluding section. #2: Do get feedback from experienced individuals that you trust and respect Experience is invaluable in writing competitive proposals. Get feedback from someone not directly in your field who has recently been successful at getting funding from the same agency. Also get feedback from an expert in your field. This will ensure that your proposal is accessible to all types of reviewers. Provide each reviewer a set of questions that you’d like him or her to answer. One basic question to ask is to have them summarize their understanding of what y