Funded!
Hooray! We just got information that we have an additional three years of NSF funding for our project. From a purely greedy point of view, this funding means that my final year of research can be completely focused on my publications and putting together my thesis. It also covers travel money for conferences and meetings. Further, it covers additional students and a post-doctoral student (interested & qualified? send us mail!).
But probably the largest positive lesson I’ve learned from this process? Get involved in grant writing — especially as a graduate student!
Best early feedback you will ever get
Sad but true: when you are proposing your Ph.D. thesis topic, it is very hard to get even an involved committee to think hard about issues related to your problem area. If only there were a peer-reviewed, important publication venue that you could use to as a sounding board for your idea, plan, and coverage of the related work…
I received more review of my early stage ideas during the grant-writing process than I probably ever have or will again during my academic career. And the grant reviewers are often drawn from a broader set than your normal conferences (organizations such as the NSF desire “broader impact”), so the feedback you will get from some of them will also be unique.
If you are planning to become an academic, it’s a critical skill
Research money supports not only your research, but also the university (through the > 50% of overhead charged against grant funding) and eventually your tenure case. Grant proposals are unlike any other form of writing you have probably done in the past. The NSF’s “Broader Impact” requirement includes benefits to society. For an area similar to mine — programming languages and compilers — thinking about and learning what that means takes time.
Also, unless you subscribe to the “write a grant for the thing you just did to fund the work you will do” camp of grant funding (my advisor does not), this proposal will be one of the only documents you write without concrete results backing them up. It is a balancing act to put out just the right number of details. Too few, and your planned research will not convince a funding agency that you know what you are doing. Too many, and you open yourself up to criticism for making choices that clearly will not work according to the reviwers.
It helps the group
By the time you can help with the grant-writing process, you will probably be in your fourth year of graduate school or later. If you are like me, you took advantage of the existing grants, resources, and people. Helping to obtain additional grants — even if you will not be around to use part of it — can only make the project better. And what better way to make your work appear more important than to have the project continue to flourish after you leave?
