After attending the Grant Writing Workshop (Part 1), complete the following assignment. Contact facilitator (Joe Jez, PhD - jjez@wustl.edu) with any questions.
PART 1: Draft background, hypothesis, and specific aims
DUE: [TBD] to jjez@wustl.edu
Imagine you were remaining in your lab for graduate school and will be applying to the NSF-GRF competition this fall. Think about extending your project from one summer to a few years - what would you do, what is the hypothesis, and how would you break this down into 3-4 specific aims?
For this assignment, a 1-page draft is the goal (if you go to 2 pages, that's okay). The draft should have a working title, some background to the context of the project, a hypothesis statement, and a series of specific aims that lay out experiments to test the hypothesis.
PART 2: Small Group Reading/Comments
After you send your proposals, Dr. Jez will try to group by general area - aiming for six 5-person groups each with a grad student leader.
Dr. Jez will comment on all the proposals. The grad student leader will comment on the 5 proposals in the group. Within the small group you will read all 5 proposals - 2 as primary/secondary reader.
Dr. Jez will provide a list of what is meant by primary/secondary/tertiary reader, along with some questions/points to look for in the proposals.
Small Group Peer Feedback Sessions
Tuesday, July 15
Here we will meet and break into the small groups - 1 grad student lead and 5 of you. You'll go around the table with feedback.
Order for each proposal feedback:
primary reader (responsible for major critique)
secondary reader (add points not mentioned by the primary reader)
rest of group (any other comments feedback)
grad student leader (will do a deep dive on the proposal and wrap-up comments/summary)
NOTES:
1" margins
Times New Roman font for all text (Cambria Math for equations; Symbol for non-alphabetic characters)
11-point font (figure legend text can be smaller)
single-space (not exactly 11 point or others)
See https://www.nsfgrfp.org/applicants/ for more information.