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In my last posts, I covered considerations for writing career development awards, and tips specific to the K99/R00. After submitting my application, I scoured the web for information on what to do next. Alas, more people focused on the submission rather than subsequent steps. This is perhaps unsurprising since the next phase is waiting. Here, I will discuss the different events you will await. For NIH application veterans, there is nothing new here, but for first time applicants, the process is surprisingly slow. These events are based on posted NIH policies, my experiences, and the experiences of my fellow awardees, so as always, n=me and a few of my friends.

Waiting for study section review: There is a five month waiting period between grant submission and the first level of review. One positive aspect of this long wait is that you can publish additional papers or do more experiments for your potential/probable resubmission. About a month before the study section meets, you will receive an email from the Program Officer (PO) and have the opportunity to provide specific updated documents, like biosketches. Important updates include papers accepted, honors awarded, and new positions for your mentors, like promotion to full professor. One of my fellow awardees had to re-write the training section to address a mentor’s move to a new institution. Your PO can advise if you have questions.

Waiting for your scores: Your study section review date will be listed in eRA Commons, and your grant score will be posted within a couple days of the study section meeting. A score of 10 is perfect, a score of 90 is the opposite, and ND is “not discussed”. Additional details can be found here. For career development awards, grants are awarded based on their impact score. Different institutes, funding mechanisms, and years have different paylines. In our experiences, these can be difficult to track down, but in general, if your impact score is under 20, you are likely to be recommended for funding. The Writedit blog was a great resource for many of us across several institutes and funding mechanisms. Also, let your mentors know the score. I have heard mentors grumble about never knowing grant outcomes until they are asked to update a letter.

Waiting for your pink sheets: The reviews of your grant are posted within 6 weeks of the study section meeting. Our pooled average was 4 weeks. It is likely that your application will score close to or outside of the payline. Read the reviews. Process your emotions. Read the reviews again and make a list of your application’s criticisms. Reach out to your PO to discuss the application and gauge their enthusiasm. If you are close to the payline, you may still be competitive. Again, your PO will provide advice. If they tell you that you should resubmit, plan to revise and resubmit. If you are well outside the range, you will need to revise and resubmit. For both scenarios, send the reviews to your mentors, along with the list you wrote, and together define an action plan to make the application more competitive. Reading and responding to comments is painful, but it is great practice for your grant-driven career. If you are below the payline, and thus within funding range, congratulations. Send your pink sheets to your mentors too, so they can bask in good reviews. Somewhere in this timeframe, if your application has the potential to be funded, your PO will request that you submit your Just in Time (JIT) information. This includes updated Other Support for key personnel, Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) approval for animal studies, and/or Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for human subjects.

Waiting for council to meet: Regardless of your score, the final fate of the grant application is recommended by the institute’s advisory council and decided by the institute director. The lower your score, the more likely you are to get funded. While a PO cannot magic a bad application into funding range, they can advocate for your application. These are usually applications that fall outside the funding range and address an unmet need in the institute’s research portfolio. In our cohort, one borderline and two out of payline applications were selected for funding.

Waiting for the grant to arrive: If your grant is selected for funding, you will still have to wait for it to arrive at your institution. When all is said and done, this process, from application submission to earliest start date, takes 10 months. Plan accordingly.

A note to unsuccessful applicants: Not all applicants will be awarded a career development award, so do not lose hope. These grants, as all grants, are incredibly competitive, and there is an element of luck in the process. For the postdocs reading, you do not need a career development award to land a tenure-track position. Our job searches with K awards were no easier than those of our friends without K awards. Your unfunded career development award is the perfect chalk talk, and you should plan on submitting a revised version as an R01 within a year of starting your new position. For the MDs looking to launch their research careers, keep applying for various grants. Your department is invested, and they will help where they can.

With some great science and solid mentoring, hopefully the day will come when your grant is awarded and you can begin your research in earnest. If you are on a traditional K award, carefully plan when you will submit your first R01 (for terrifying details, see the “Taking Flight” post). For trainees with the K99/R00 award, the grant raises a whole slew of questions. In my next post, I will address how long the K99 phase should be, whether or not you should move, and what the K99 to R00 transition looks like. Stay tuned for more tales!

Still have questions? More confused than when you started? Need to vent about the process? Feel free to send some electrons my way in the comments, via Twitter @PipetteProtag, or through traditional electronic mail pipette.protagonist@gmail.com

Summer is a great time for home improvement projects.  But let’s face it, these projects can be seriously dull.  The NIH All About Grants podcast can help you make the best use of your time.  The podcast is not flashy, but it is USEFUL.  I listened to nearly all of them two years ago as I stained my back deck, and they really helped me to learn more about the grant process.  They are the perfect speed and content for learning while you complete mindless, repetitive tasks.

Topics include the NIH’s inclusion across the lifespan policy, understanding biosketch requirements, and two brand new podcasts on the appendix policy and the post application submission policy. These 10-minute podcasts are not showy or overly dense.  They are simply highly-qualified people discussing topics beneficial to grant writers.

Can you get this information from other sources?  Yes.  However, this podcast is perfect to help you keep moving forward on your grant goals, even as you knock out that boring home improvement task.  It’s nice to hear this important information presented in a discussion format as if they were talking to you over a cup of coffee.  Each expert provides gentle reminders on areas that are confusing or difficult for new grant writers.

It’s been a great two years since I first listened to the All About Grants podcasts. I now have the external K that I was working toward.

Now I am knee deep in learning about compliance and aiming toward an R.  My deck needs a refresher.  I think this weekend I will grab some stain and queue up the episodes on “sharing in the research sandbox” and public access policy compliance. This way when I get the R, my deck will look great for the celebration party.

More by Julia Phillippi, PhD:

You MUST Read Dreyer’s English

Simple Steps to Validating and Managing Others: A Bedtime Story

Email: Do It Well

Our department in my former institution has a very strong track record of securing career development awards for PhD and MD trainees, both on the basic and clinical research fronts.  Aside from the strong science in the department and the substantial resources of the institution, the biggest contributor to the success of the trainees in these grants was experience. The mentors knew the elements to include in the letters and how to leverage their expertise in the research projects, the trainees had watched older trainees work through and revise applications, the administrators were familiar with the particulars of these unique grants, and our Chair had mastered the letter of support.  All these factors contributed to strong outcomes for our grant applications.  This has led me to believe that access to successful applicants, their mentors, and their applications is paramount to the success of crafting the grant. I was lucky to be in a department with this amount of experience in career development awards, but many trainees are not. Here are some strategies that were successful for us. As always, n=me and a few of my friends.

Determine whether you are a good applicant: During my time as a postdoc, I watched quite a few early career scientists obsess over whether they were a good applicant for fellowships and career development awards. Concerns ranged from not enough papers (there will never be enough), not enough preliminary data (again, never enough), to not enough time to write (still, never enough). When I submitted my application, I did not believe myself to be a good applicant either, but thought I would be by the re-submission. The review committee disagreed. The grant scored well, and my perception shifted. If you satisfy the eligibility criteria for the award (time after degree, mentored position, etc.), want to pursue a career in research but need additional training and mentored time, and your mentor and/or Chair is supportive of your application, then you are a good applicant. Let the review committee determine if you should be an awardee.

Examine successful applications: I cannot express how important it was for me to see people writing career development awards and read successful applications before I started. First and foremost, this gave me a very strong grasp of the amount of work career development awards entail. The science is, by far, the easiest part! Some institutions have grant repositories that you can access, which keep grants behind an institutional login, and include not only the application but the application review (“pink sheets”) as well. You can always read the summaries from successful career awards on NIH RePORTER. Do not be afraid to ask your mentors if they know of successful applicants who would be willing to share their grant with you. Some awardees are even generous enough to provide their submission and pink sheets, allowing you to learn from their excellence and address their missteps/oversights/omissions in your own application. If nothing else, you should systematically go through the program announcement and identify all the components you will need to complete your career development award application.

Identify a project: The goal of the grant is to develop your career, therefore while the science needs to be strong, the focus of the grant should be how the science, your proposed training, and excellent mentoring committee will move you to the next step of your career, i.e. an R01. The successful grants that I have seen leveraged the experience of their current mentor and utilized the expertise of additional mentors to grow away from their mentor’s research as the grant progresses. At the end of the career development award, you want to occupy your own research niche. Your mentor will, of course, write a very nice letter stating that they will not compete with you, but the distinction between your research programs must be obvious to the review committee.

Select the training: If you cannot identify a single area in which you require additional training, career development awards are likely not for you. Again, you are using this additional mentored time to develop the skills you need to be successful at the next level. Determine where you are deficient and take a class or attend a workshop. In my experience, these have ranged from biostatistics courses for us translational PhD types to workshops in molecular biology for the surgeon-scientists to translational cancer research conferences for basic scientists. Leverage the resources of your institution and professional societies and be specific. Review committees want to know you have thought about your career development plan and want to see it executed.

Identify a mentor/mentors/mentoring committee: For us PhDs, this part is fairly straightforward: we pick our postdoc mentor as the primary mentor and build a committee around where we need additional expertise. For MDs, there is a little more flexibility. Part of this process is introspection. Where are you weakest? Are you a surgeon-scientists doing a basic science project? Identify strong basic science mentors to support the mechanistic parts of your projects. Are you a PhD in a clinical department? Recruit an MD to keep the translational aspect of your studies in focus. Another point to consider is what kind of research do you want to do next? Will your mentors get you there? Your mentors must be committed to the mentoring roles you identify for them and their commitment should be obvious in their letters of support. Name recognition of your mentors will do you little good if the review committee fails to believe you can secure a Nobel laureate, clinical Chair, and the world’s greatest biologist for your mentoring committee meetings. Choose wisely.

Once you have confirmed your eligibility, examined grant requirements, and defined the mentoring/research/training program, it is time to write. In my next post, I will discuss my experiences and share the experiences of my fellow K99/R00 awardees, from start to R00 transition and a little beyond. K awards are weird awards, but the K99/R00 is a very odd beast indeed.  Stay tuned for more tales!

More Resources

Not that Kind of Grant Application: Tales of Waiting for Career Development Awards

Not that Kind of Selection: Tales of Picking Which Grants to Write

More Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Wrote My K

Proposed research project is feasible? Check. Timeline formatted? Check. Milestones added? Check. Now it’s time to break the work into manageable chunks, a process cleverly called work breakdown.

Breaking the work down enables you to spread your grant writing over time and still have a life. Work breakdown for writing a grant is a two-step process. The first step is creating work packages. These are the large “buckets” of work that need to be completed for the actual submission. Here is a schematic of the work breakdown structure. Within each bucket will be a number of specific tasks that will need to be done to “empty” that particular bucket. Creating the tasks is the second step and will be covered in next week’s blog.

The easiest way to create your buckets is to list all documents required for the submission. For NIH proposals, the Program Announcement (PA) or the Request for Applications (RFA) will have a list of the documents. Downloading the application package also works.

Once you have all documents (fillable forms, work you generate and place on the appropriate form) listed, verify the list by comparing it to the PA, RFA, similar recently submitted/funded proposals, and/or by having someone experienced in grant submissions review it with you. Make additions/changes as needed, then group the documents into logical buckets of work. Try to keep your number of buckets to ten or fewer if possible. These checklists for NIH K and NIH R show elements (required and possibly needed) for their respective proposals. Colors indicate one possible set of work packages (read: buckets), but feel free to create your own.

Your assignment:

• Decide what you will call each bucket. For example you may decide to group Specific Aims and Research Strategy into a bucket called “Body of Grant.” See the checklists (K, R) for additional examples. Notice that names of work buckets do not include a verb. They are not actions; they are a piece of work that needs to be done.
• Assign each bucket a color of sticky note and write the name of the bucket on the sticky note of the assigned color

Place the sticky notes in a blank column on your timeline.

Next Post: What’s in Your Bucket(s)?

Previous Posts:

1. #*@*! Plan Is Not a Four-Letter Word
2. Planning to Plan: Gathering Materials
3. Can You (Really) Do Your Proposed Study?
4. Researchers–Start Your Timelines
5. 500 Mile(stones)

How will you know you are progressing satisfactorily toward your chosen date for submitting your grant proposal? Defining milestones will help.

Earlier blogs have addressed why doing a plan for your submission is a good idea, key concepts in project planning, how to assess the feasibility of your proposed project, and how to construct a blank timeline. This blog will explain a way to gauge your progress toward meeting the submission deadline.

Project milestones are key events that tell you whether you are proceeding as planned. They are specific points in the development of your proposal. Failure to meet these targeted points (milestones) could derail your plan (there’s that word again!) and cause you to miss your submission date. Once established, milestones should not be moved without extremely good reason to do so. Examples of milestones include the submission date itself, internal deadlines for budget review and approval, other internal deadlines unique to your institution or situation (e.g., mock review), dates you will get your work to colleagues for input, and when you will do the actual submission (hint: probably NOT on the day it is actually due).

I also suggest taking a broader look at the world around you and add important dates to your milestones list. While not milestones in the truest sense, these are dates that are important to you or to others who will be helping you with your proposal. These are dates that apply to multiple people or to you as an individual. Examples include holidays, vacation times (yours or team members’), on-call times, teaching times, child’s birthday, or anniversary. In other words, dates/times you 1) cannot work on the proposal, 2) alter what part of the proposal you can work on, or 3) plan to put the proposal aside to concentrate on something else in your life.

Now that you have a good idea of milestones and other important dates, here is your assignment.

You will need paper and pencil (Luddite approach—use your computer if you choose), a calendar, your timeline with dates at the tops of the columns, one single color of sticky notes, and your chart marker with a medium-sized point.

Write all deadlines and other milestones on the paper (or your computer). Add other important dates as discussed above. Review and make certain you have captured all relevant dates. Now transfer dates to the sticky notes, one date per sticky. Or you can put your milestones and other dates directly on the sticky notes if you prefer. Then place the sticky notes under the appropriate column on your timeline. I suggest aligning milestones and important dates across the bottom of the timeline so you can see them at a glance. You may also want to put these dates in your regular calendaring system.

Next week I will explain work breakdown and provide details on how to begin.

Next Post: Buckets of Fun (Work?)

Previous Posts:

1. #*@*! Plan Is Not a Four-Letter Word
2. Planning to Plan: Gathering Materials
3. Can You (Really) Do Your Proposed Study?
4. Researchers–Start Your Timelines

…a deceptively simple question that can be interpreted in several ways.

For purposes of planning your proposed research study, answering the question (read: assessing feasibility) means looking at your idea from three perspectives—scope, cost, and time.

The scope of your project defines your project’s boundaries and outlines its major characteristics. A well thought-out statement of scope contains:

• Your idea and a justification for why you are proposing it,
• A list of the resources your project will need (includes equipment, supplies, space, people, etc.)
• The project’s constraints or limitations, and
• What the project will include and what it will NOT include.

The next logical question is what will your project cost? A rough estimate is sufficient. You will fine-tune costs when you develop the budget. Examples of costs include:

• Personnel (a later blog will discuss ways to predict personnel needs based on your study design),
• Equipment and supplies,
• Obtaining/storing specimens,
• Recruiting and retaining participants,
• Purchasing large sets of data,
• Experimental animals, and
• Lab tests

Here is a checklist of possible cost items for a proposal to the NIH. You will likely include similar items in budgets for proposals to other funding agencies.

The final piece of assessing feasibility is time. Again, a rough estimate is sufficient. How long will completing each major element–e.g., recruiting participants; conducting experiments, tests, interventions; completing interviews–of your research study take (weeks, months)? Can/will you do any or all elements simultaneously (in parallel) or complete one before starting another (in series)? How will the work play out along a time continuum? How much total time (years) will you need to complete the proposed study?

None of the three feasibility factors is unlimited and each one has implications for the other two. Scope, cost, and time exist in a dynamic relationship, and there is always tension among them. Changing one will affect one or both of the others. Think of a triangle with each side representing one of the factors. If you expand the scope (read: scope creep), time and cost are changed. If your proposal is funded for less than the actual costs, the scope will likely need to change to stay within budget. If you need to compress the time, you may need to add personnel, purchase supplies earlier than planned, or take other actions that will increase the cost.

Assignment designed to help you assess the feasibility of your project:

Imagine you are presenting your project idea to a panel of people who control the $$$. Either write a short document or develop a brief PowerPoint presentation that covers the following areas:

• What is your idea and what is your justification for proposing it? (1 paragraph each, or a single slide with key points)
• How many people will you need and why? (1 short paragraph or a single slide)
• What other resources (big ticket items) will you need? (Short list)
• Your rough estimate of the costs. (Single statement)
• Your best estimate of how much time you will need to complete the work. (Single statement)

Your document should be a single page, or if you choose to do a PowerPoint, it should be no longer than 3 slides. Use your document or your presentation to engage colleagues, co-investigators, experts, mentors, and other stakeholders in a conversation regarding feasibility. Note comments, concerns, and questions, and figure out how you will address them. Iterate until you feel confident your proposal is feasible.

Next Post: Researchers–Start Your Timelines

Previous Posts:

1. #*@*! Plan Is Not a Four-Letter Word
2. Planning to Plan: Gathering Materials