6% and One Chance of Submission
It’s pretty dismal at NSF these days. You’ve got one chance per year for submission with the preproposal policy and it gets worse 
from there. In a particular panel, only 30% of the preproposals were invited to submit a full proposal. Only 6% of full proposals received funding.
With odds like that you need an edge.
Federal research funding is declining or leveling off depending on the field. This happened before in the mid-1990s. I know. I was there. The media reported it.
Nonprofit Grants vs. Research Grants: A Parallel Universe
Research grants in the sciences and their siblings in other disciplines at the university level inhabit a parallel universe to the wider nonprofit grant consulting community. The grant writers in this universe are mostly college and university faculty members holding discipline specific doctoral degrees. Since I was one of them for over 20 years as a college biology professor, I know this universe very well. On the surface the higher education universe represents a different grant culture. In 2012, Georgia alone received $1.9 billion in research and development funding. For the scientific research community, this culture is very niche specific, but if you dig deeper it comes down to serving the greater good. Serving that greater good means asking that hard, frustrating question all children ask their parents; WHY?, then attempting to answer it through laboratory experiments or other means. On the whole, scientists are just kids who never stopped asking why.
When I crossed the divide into the wider grant consulting community, I noticed folks like me (former faculty) were few. Yet, the breadth and depth of grants experience within the Grant Professionals Association (I am a member) impressed me. At first, I was worried that I didn’t really know enough as a grant professional. It didn’t take me long to realize that the skill set I acquired in the parallel universe of laboratory research as principal investigator (project director) of federally funded grants was completely transferable. Those skills include research, writing, teaching, speaking, and a perverse attention to detail. Yet, my niche is still in the realm of scientific research.
All is not well in the parallel universe. Funding is very tight in some research areas. Faculty researchers live and work under constant pressure to publish the next paper, the next book, and get the next grant funded. This constant pressure contributes to an unhealthy workaholism unique to the scientific research community. How can really great, groundbreaking scientific ideas – like research on Ebola treatments – develop into funded grant proposals under these conditions? They can’t. Faculty members need help. Ideally, it should come from colleagues and academic mentors, but most of these people are too busy with their own career issues.
Two business mentors (one general and one scientific), reminded me many times that there is no shortage of work for consultants in either sector. Too many faculty researchers struggle telling scientific stories and don’t receive funding. Scientists are among the most skeptical people on the planet. Credibility is everything with them. Outside research grant help has to come from someone who knows the culture, understands peer review of proposals, and has principal investigator experience – in other words somebody like me.
Check out the rest of The Grant Science Lab for all kinds of academic and grant writing advice.
Scientific or Scholarly Isolation is Real
Nobody talks openly about this topic. If they do it’s in hushed tones. It happens in colleges and universities large and small. No one is exempt, from undergraduate students to principal investigators. The humanities and social sciences are not immune to this phenomenon either. A few graduate student members of my knitting group in those disciplines told me horror stories of committee disruption and taking up to 10 years to finish dissertations.
Reasons abound for why research isolation occurs. Bad projects happen. Research interests may conflict. Budget woes are often part of the mix. General neglect of the situation seems the mostly likely cause. The right kind of mentoring for students and faculty would probably address most of the reasons for research isolation. If you’ve been paying attention, NSF really encourages concrete mentoring plans through the broader impacts requirement of their grant proposals.
I experienced a few of these research isolation scenarios myself over 20+ years of the academic life. Having funded research helps. Not long ago I wrote a white paper that describes what happened to me and what I did to fix the problems. Click the button below to receive the white paper.
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