Overcoming Proposal Phobia

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Overcoming Proposal Phobia

• Linda Petzold
• Departments of Mechanical Engineering and
  Computer Science
• University of California, Santa Barbara

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Objective

• Convince someone to fund your research

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Getting Started - Intrinsic Scientific Merit

• Convince yourself
• What do you want to do?
• Why?

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Getting Started - Impact

• Are there scientific/engineering problems that
  could be solved better as a result of this work?
• Who is solving these problems?
• How do they see the proposed work fitting in?
• Are they willing to be your advocate?

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Getting Started - Audience

• Who does this proposal need to convince?
• Funding Agency
• Who might be interested in funding this research
  and why?
• Gather information colleagues, friends from
  other disciplines, web, publications, news
• Reviewers
• colleagues in your field
• Panelists
• maybe interdisciplinary

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Writers Block

• Use another (successful) proposal as a model
• Serve as a reviewer or panelist to see the
  process in action
• Talk to your senior colleagues about how they do
  it

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Contents of the Proposal

• Background
• Impact
• Proposed work

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Common Dilemma

• In order to write a coherent research plan, you
  will probably have done or know how to do part of
  the work.
• Dont be afraid to propose the rest, along with
  the anticipated technical challenges.

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Format

• Get the agency guidelines and follow the
  instructions.

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Dos and Donts

• Do
• Make your points clearly and concisely
• What do you want to do?
• Why? (intrinsic scientific merit)
• Who would it benefit? (impact)
• Present your ideas and results accurately
• Outline the technical challenges and how you plan
  to meet them
• Mention any experience you have relative to this
  problem
• Put your work in context whats been done
  before, and what are its strengths and
  weaknesses?
• Make appropriate references to the literature
• Present a coherent plan of attack for the problem

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Dos and Donts

• Dont
• Go to a smaller font to meet the page limitations
• Confuse your proposal with your latest research
  paper
• Use an overly pedantic style
• Forget to mention others contributions
• Go overboard with detail
• Be too negative about potential difficulties

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Interdisciplinary Proposals

• Essential Components
• Challenging scientific or engineering problem
• Potential impact for society
• Dream Team for this problem - no weak links or
  missing pieces
• Linkage - has this team or parts of it worked
  together before?
• Leverage
• Other sources of funding for this work or parts
  of it
• Potential impact of the proposed work on other
  work by the PIs

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If you dont ask,you dont get. - Ghandi