Circulate
Ideally, every section of the grant will be circulated but it is critical to have others review the Specific Aims at the very least. Ask not only your mentors and those in the field to critique but also those outside of your area and even your friends and unsuspecting family members; they may not know (or care) about the content but should be able to follow the flow and identify grammatical errors. Remember that everyone is busy, so give ample time for people to review the documents.
Read other proposals
Practice makes perfect. So you can either apply for many grants and make the mistakes yourself or read and review as many proposals as you can to learn from your colleagues’ successes and mistakes. Many institutions, mentors, and colleagues will provide copies of prior applications if you ask. Make sure you know which were successful and try to understand why the others were not successful.
When reading the aims and research strategy, pay close attention to how significance and innovation are detailed. Also, some things like the research environment, which is especially important for career development grants, may be directly applicable to your grant.
Help the reviewer
In general, reviewing grants is a voluntary undertaking. Imagine the reviewer reading your grant at a home filled with screaming children or, alternatively, flying in cramped quarters. Neither situation is stress-free, so put yourself in those positions and decide what you can do to make the reviewer’s job easier.
Use figures and tables to summarize the text, and consider coming back to the figure from your Specific Aims to refer to the specific parts of the proposal. You can decrease reviewer fatigue by using line breaks and fonts to break up sections and highlight important details. This will also be helpful to the reviewers on the panel who were not assigned to your grant and possibly first seeing it during the session.
Learn from rejection
You are either a savant or have not applied for enough grants if you have not received a rejection letter. Often, reviewers provide you with constructive comments, which (after a session of crying in the corner in a fetal position), you can use to improve your grant. Resubmission works!
Apply widely
Identify different possible grants, and work with your mentors on a strategy that allows you to make your idea versatile and package it for various funding mechanisms. Once you have a grant, you can tailor it to other grants as needed. However, remember that quantity does not replace quality, so many poor grants that are not funded will not replace one good one that is funded.
There are multiple approaches to training for the marathon of research, so these tips are not a comprehensive list or mandatory commandments. They have, however, proven invaluable to our mentors and us. Our institutions, societies and government agencies have identified the decline of young scientists and physician-scientists as a major leak in the research pipeline, so there are excellent funding mechanisms that are available to you. Good luck!
We would like to acknowledge Jennifer Weiss, MD, and Sumera Rizvi, MD, for their constructive comments.
Dr. Beyder is with the enteric neuroscience program, a consultant for the department of gastroenterology and hepatology, and an assistant professor of biomedical engineering and physiology at the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine, Rochester, Minn.; Dr. Twyman-Saint Victor is an assistant professor of medicine in the division of gastroenterology at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
