OPPapers.com

Reserach Proposal

TWELVE STEPS TO A WINNING RESEARCH PROPOSAL George A. Hazelrigg National Science Foundation I have been an NSF program director for 18 years. During this time, I have personally administered the review of some 3,000 proposals and been involved in the review of perhaps another 10,000. Through this experience, I have come to see that often there are real differences between winning proposals and losing proposals. The differences are clear. Largely, they are not subjective differences or differences of quality; to a large extent, losing proposals are just plain missing elements that are found in winning proposals. Although I have known this for some time, a recent experience reinforced it. I was having lunch with a young faculty person who had come to NSF to sit on her first proposal review panel. I asked her what she had learned from the process. She quickly rattled off six or eight lessons she could take home. And they were all good lessons. My response was, “Good, just learn from this experience and don’t make the mistakes that the losing proposals made.” You can do the same, and vastly improve your chance of success in proposal writing. Just follow these twelve simple steps. 1. Know yourself: Know your area of expertise, what are your strengths and what are your weaknesses. Play to your strengths, not to your weaknesses. Do not assume that, because you do not understand an area, no one understands it or that there has been no previous research conducted in the area. If you want to get into a new area of research, learn something about the area before you write a proposal. Research previous work. Be a scholar. 2. Know the program from which you seek support: You are responsible for finding the appropriate program for support of your research. Don’t leave this task up to someone else. If you are not absolutely certain which program is appropriate, call the program officer to find out. Never submit a proposal to a program if you are not certain that it is the correct...