Writing an NSF GRFP Proposal
This summer and fall I wrote and submitted my very first grant proposal. Since I plan on pursing a career with NOAA, and need a PhD to do so, I have been exploring different options in graduate programs as well as funding opportunities. Grad school is not cheap!
My major takeaways from this endeavor were that (1) writing takes a LOT of planning and (2) collaboration is less intimidating than I originally thought!
I had the benefit of having two fantastic professors (Dr. Anahi Espindola and Dr. Karen Carleton) lead a class dedicated to writing and peer reviewing GRFPs. I was in a class of 12 students, a mix of undergrad, first and second year grad students, all working on writing our GRFPs. We started in June and met all the way through the week of the October 17th deadline. Without this course, I likely would have struggled to submit on time!
Additionally, in order to design the research plan and also start looking for grad programs, I reached out to Dr. Kerstin Wasson and Dr. Ingrid Parker at the University of California, Santa Cruz. They were generous with their time and assistance, as they helped me develop my research plan. Originally, just emailing them to ask for help felt extremely intimidating, and I felt like I was asking too much of them. However, they were extremely kind, I learned a lot from them, and I built my confidence to interact with more professors along the way!
Lessons learned:
START EARLY! If I hadn’t started in June, no way would I have finished. Taking a class for it was helpful because I tend to procrastinate, and having class deadlines made me ‘cram’ to finish drafts back in August. This made it so much easier to finish because I was having my procrastination moment that usually happens the night before, way earlier than the deadline! Maybe that’s a toxic trait of mine, but it was nice to beat my brain.
Word vomit is okay and actually helpful. On days where I would put off writing or feel like I couldn’t think of anything good enough, it was so helpful to just write the ‘dumbest’ version of things I could think of. I remember only having one sentence, but as I wrote about the “vibes” of the plants, it made it easier to talk it out and just explode all over my google doc. It’s better to have a lot of content that’s “bad” so you have something to work with. Cutting words down and editing was so much less stressful when I actually had words to work with. Even if it feels like the writing is terrible, it’s better than nothing!
Utilize any and all people around you! I begged for help from literally everyone around me. Not only the UCSC and UMD professors, but my English major roommate, my best friend, my mom, my friend/grad school mentor Yan, etc. Having any and all sets of eyes on my work was a little scary, but I told myself it was better than not being self aware of how my writing was. I got some tough reviews, but I think it was beneficial. Also, the GRFP and other grants typically have people reviewing that are not super in depth to your topic (at least not as much as you are), so it was helpful having a balance of academics and laymen to be able to toe the line between scientific jargon and accessible language.
You’re a better applicant than you think you are. I remember meeting with UMD’s scholarship office and one of the people reviewing my CV basically told me I didn’t have a competitive resume. They said I needed more outreach, and that I had barely done enough research and presentations. To be fair, at that stage I had applied to IMET, but hadn’t heard back yet. But still! That was tough to hear, but I’m glad I still applied anyway.
Personal statements are a journey that just makes sense. This sounds confusing, but hear me out. Dr. Espindola gave our class a key piece of advice when we were starting our personal statements. She said that as a reviewer reads your statement and about your research experiences, the conclusion of what your proposal is or your career goal should “just make sense.” It should be a satisfying ending to the story and journey you have been on. I took this advice to mean that they should all connect in some way. So for me, FIRE, IMET, and Bruns lab all had something that connected to coastal plant research. FIRE was just that I was invested in application of research, IMET was estuaries/coasts, and Bruns lab was plant research! I suppose mine is a little straightforward, but I was also searching myself at the same time. I guess I hadn’t totally decided on a research niche yet, so not only did this help me write my statement, it also helped me reflect and discover what I wanted to study.
Grants and Grad School are about the Stars Aligning. It’s not about you. That was the toughest thing for me to understand. Preparing for the GRFP was stressful, and I was applying to graduate schools at the same time. And it did work out for me, but I do my best to recognize that it’s not necessarily because I am “better” than any of the other applicants that applied to the GRFP or the schools I applied to. While I am proud of my accomplishments, and think they make me well suited for grad school, the main take away here is that not only was I well-suited, I also found mentors that could take students, was able to get funding, had reviewers who connected with my story, and chose schools that felt like good fits for me. For others, perhaps they were the perfect well-suited student, but the mentors they contacted had full labs, or the reviewer at the NSF didn’t connect with their story, or just didn’t like their proposal when another reviewer may have loved it.
Personal Statement. Written by Emma Yockman for the NSF GRFP.
Graduate Research Plan. Written by Emma Yockman with assistance from Kerstin Wasson for the NSF GRFP.
If you’d like more advice on the NSF GRFP, just shoot me an email!
Cover photo by Bill Roberts.
