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A 'once upon a time' semi-helpful rundown for going after NSF proposals

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A “once upon a time” semi-helpful rundown for going after NSF proposals

Note:

I wrote this in a now defunct blog a couple of years back probably around 2 BC (2 years before covid, or 2018). This blog entry was directed toward academic types or newly minted assistant professors, or anyone interested in one person’s experience with NSF proposals as a reviewer and as a proposer from a non-R1 school. These were based on my experiences so I may be way off on the whole process, but I don’t think so. It would be interesting to know what all has changed in the NSF funding arena, especially since I just read an interesting article from Sarah Hill, entitled, “Drop in NSF Proposals: More Proposals Funded?” I’m out as an institutional academic so I’m currently out of the loop. (Also, I was a first-generation PhD academic that worked at NASA for almost my entire PhD training and had very little guidance on how to be a university professor or how to pursue grants, so my learning curve was quite steep!)

The sum-up (For those not ready to commit to all of the words that follow):

Reviewers seem to always ask a set of questions, guided by the NSF rubric of the time:

  1. What is the potential for the proposed activity to:
    • Advance knowledge and understanding within its own field or across different fields? (Intellectual Merit)
    • Benefit society or advance desired societal outcomes? (Broader Impacts)

  2. To what extent do the proposed activities suggest and explore creative, original, or potentially transformative concepts?

  3. Is the plan for carrying out the proposed activities well-reasoned, well-organized, and based on a sound rationale? Does the plan incorporate a mechanism to assess success?

  4. How well qualified is the individual, team, or organization to conduct the proposed activities?

  5. Are there adequate resources available to the PIs either at the home organization or through collaborations to carry out the proposed activities?

What does this translate as, to me?

Oh, and do all this on top of teaching, staff meetings, committees, college meetings, guest lectures, advising, and other poorly defined responsibilities put on you by administrators eager to check off boxes.

The Full Post

I’ve had the good fortune of sitting on review panels for the National Science Foundation (in person and via the interweb). And I’ve also had the misfortune of being rejected by NSF panels as a proposer. A lot. Like, a lot a lot. The NSF does provide a fairly detailed explanation of what they are looking for in their request for proposals (RFP), but at the same time, they leave it rather ambiguous. It also sometimes depends on what the Program Director for a particular program is looking to fund in that cycle. I’ve read successfully funded proposals that didn’t quite articulate their points well, so there is some art and leeway to the whole process.

Being on a review panel is quite brutal on the body and mind, but well worth it. For the in-person panels I participated in, I flew into DC and they (the NSF) reserved a block of rooms at a hotel and set up a mini network for all of the panelists. Your specific panel works for a Program Director that oversees a number of different programs. You will review between nine and fifteen proposals for one specific request for proposals (RFP) over the course of about 24 hours. You work all day deliberating, get back to your room and work some more, sleep a few hours, get up and finalize the deliberations with Accept (usually with changes to the budget; dollar amount down, never up), Reject (sometimes encourage to re-submit but usually not), or Re-submit (we really liked this proposal but for whatever reason we need to see more, rare). Individual reviewers and the review panel also offer proposal scores – poor, good, very good, excellent. Poor was rarely given out so if you received a “good” it was likely a “poor.” And, anything less than an excellent makes it very difficuly to expect to be funded (though not impossible).

After the review process was complete we were dismissed. Then I got onto a plane and went home. Sometimes you had the fortune of doing these reviews on the NSF campus, but that wasn’t me, just a nearby hotel. The online review panel I participated in wasn’t very different than the hotel version for me, but I needed a big computer screen, a camera, and a trusty internet connection. No plane ride, which I was totally fine with. I imagine that since Covid, this is how the reviews are completed.

I’ve been on review panels where I thought something was trash (ahem, not worthy of funding) and then when I heard what the other reviewers had to say, I changed my mind. And vice versa. You are reading so many of these things and you bring in your own biases that you are not immediately aware of. That’s probably why you are on a panel and not just asked to do this solo. It’s pretty funny, too – You seem to always have one reviewer that hates all of them and one reviewer that thinks they are all great, with the rest on a sliding scale of skepticism.

Panels can have six or seven reviewers, or for very specific RFPs, there can be just three. It can depend greatly on the subject and availability of reviewers. I’ve been rejected as a proposer with panel review notes that make me wonder if the reviewers really read what I wrote. I know, sour grapes, but it sure did seem that way. I have also witnessed panel deliberations on proposals that I thought weren’t the best but got more review time than I thought was merited because of who the Principal Investigator (PI) or institution was (ultimately the decision, I believe, was not impacted by this, but I could see the pangs some had that they had to say no). These cannot be double blind reviews because you need to have context and past track record.

I’ve also been told that young PIs absolutely need to apply for a CAREER grant (early career award) while they can. (Until fairly recently, non-tenured faculty members like me could not apply for CAREER grants.) Once you get one of those CAREER grants, your odds of additional (and continual) funding goes way up. I’ve asked around and have been told that departments that are successful at being funded on CAREER grants really coddle their newly hired assistant professors by not letting them teach much while they get their lab established and are able to generate the preliminary data they need for a successful CAREER proposal. Federal funding allocations seem to be going down, so this process is only getting more difficult to navigate. And because the NSF has to report back to congress, saying they funded projects that generate good science and spur new technology, they are incentivized to continue to fund known commodities with successful outcomes, making it all that harder to break into the funding pool.

With that taste for at least my version of the process, I believe reviewers always ask a set of questions, guided by the NSF rubric:

  1. What is the potential for the proposed activity to:
    • Advance knowledge and understanding within its own field or across different fields? (Intellectual Merit)
    • Benefit society or advance desired societal outcomes? (Broader Impacts)

  2. To what extent do the proposed activities suggest and explore creative, original, or potentially transformative concepts?

  3. Is the plan for carrying out the proposed activities well-reasoned, well-organized, and based on a sound rationale? Does the plan incorporate a mechanism to assess success?

  4. How well qualified is the individual, team, or organization to conduct the proposed activities?

  5. Are there adequate resources available to the PIs either at the home organization or through collaborations to carry out the proposed activities?

What does this translate as, to me?

Oh, and do all this on top of teaching, staff meetings, committees, college meetings, guest lectures, advising, and other poorly defined responsibilities.

I will say that the first two items of point number one always seem like a bit of voodoo to me. Intellectual Merit statements are okay, but I’m talking especially about the Broader Impacts. Benefit society or advance desired social outcomes? That’s just asking for someone to say “this research could solve the energy problem” or “cure cancer” or “reverse climate change” or “will positively impact every poor school system within a 300 mile radius.” I’ve read statements not too far off from these and I have tried to write statements that don’t sound this far reaching. I guess I still need help with that.

Much of the research grant process is geared towards the R1 and R2 institutions. They have the resources and people power in the form of endowments or federal land grant allocations and postdocs, grad students, etc to inspire confidence in being able to complete the project. Faculty there also have a lighter teaching load and have teaching assistants and lab assistants to be able to attend conferences and write grants. It’s easier to check off many of the items on that list up there. I wouldn’t be surprised if some have professional grant writers on staff that write a large portion of these grants. It’s tough to compete, and it makes you aware that you have to be realistic about what you can get funded when you are coming from a smaller institution. Or you have to try to work with the top dogs as a collaborator, which can work sometimes.

But it’s also much more of a pressure cooker at these big research institutions. There is an expectation to publish, publish, publish and to find money. My former department chair, Rob, who did the Contingent Professor Podcast with me, always said “it might actually be better to be a big fish in a smaller pond.” If you come from a solid R1 program with potential funding lines already in place before you get to the smaller university or college, you can end up being very successful and not have as much of the pressure of the R1. But you really must research the place you are going to if you were to try that. Doing an NSF Award Search by Institution can help with that.

As for funding at the undergrad institutions, there has been a great push for funding undergraduate education in all of the STEM fields. This helps even the playing field a bit, but R1s and “elite” liberal arts colleges see that pot of money, too, so competition gets stiffer. And the bigger places have more money to throw around, which does influence a funding decision, because of the congressional pressure to not waste money on “bad” or “risky” projects. Regardless, there are opportunities to make a meaningful impact by focusing on undergraduate research and education and there are pots of money exclusively for undergraduate serving institutions. The smaller institutions still get a chance to develop research programs, just on a much smaller scale.

I’ve written my fair share of NSF proposals. My first one turned out really well, but the rest have been tougher. I admit that during my time at my previous institution, I was in a peculiar bind. I’m a classically trained chemical engineer that did most of my PhD in an astrochemistry branch of NASA and then moved into an environmental science department working mostly on energy systems and sustainability. I’m interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and obviously can’t make up my mind! I have many interests -varied interests- and I follow what interests me. It’s been rewarding and stifling.

But irrespective of one’s polymath tendencies, the biggest stumbling block that you will face with respect to securing funding from a big agency is your publication record. That seems to be the easiest thing that a reviewer can pick on. If they don’t see a good publishing track record, they can’t adequately assess your ability to complete a project. So if I have any piece of advice on the whole grant process, it’s to make sure you carve out enough time to write up your research findings and get them published.

I took the liberty of finding some other links to blogs or presentations on writing up proposals to the NSF and the experiences of reviewers so that you can see other perspectives.

NSF - Why You Should Volunteer to Serve As An NSF Reviewer

NSF Grant Reviewer Tells All

Serving at NSF panels and what it teaches about how to pitch the perfect proposal

The NSF reviewing process

NSF Panels: a glimpse from the inside –> Had to Wayback This

Nanoscale Views Thoughts After NSF Panel

Drop in NSF Proposals: More Proposals Funded?