GRANTSMANSHIP AND THE PROPOSAL DEVELOPMENT PROCESS: LESSONS LEARNED FROM SEVERAL YEARS OF PROGRAMS FOR JUNIOR FACULTY

摘要

Although new engineering faculty members have an outstanding knowledge of their disciplinary research field, their knowledge and skills in developing highly competitive proposals varies widely and is often less well developed. Proposal development encompasses generating an initial idea, identifying funding sources, preparing and submitting proposals, responding to reviews, and funding or resubmission. It is not a secret process, but a craft that can be learned and honed with hard work and relationship building. Many faculty development and proposal development units and programs have crafted workshops and other faculty development strategies to help new faculty navigate this sometimes confusing and seemingly esoteric process. Fortunately, these offices can benefit through sharing practices they have found effective. The Office of Strategic Research Development of the Texas Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) at Texas A&M University has held proposal development workshops targeting junior engineering faculty and young investigator programs, especially the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, for almost 10 years as well as individual follow-up with the participants. Attendance and feedback from these workshops has resulted in several levels of workshops to address different needs and audiences, including workshops across our university system campuses on varying aspects of overall grantsmanship through regional campus research initiation workshops, graduate student fellowship seminars, presentations at graduate seminars on preparing students for academia, and post-doctoral workshops on grantsmanship. This paper summarizes these grantsmanship development events in the form of lessons that junior engineering faculty can apply when constructing an entire proposal. Each proposal contributes to a faculty member's reputation and must be approached with thoughtful attention to this end. Common struggles in proposal development include: setting and maintaining a timeline to the proposal deadline, creating goals and objectives and using them to organize a proposal, writing a proposal to sell an idea to a funding agency and not as a manuscript for publication, and focusing text to address review criteria, especially the NSF broader impacts review criterion. Carefully approaching each of the proposal development elements will ensure faculty members submit their best effort, thereby laying a good foundation for a beginning academic faculty researcher.