Hi Professors.
If you are in a book field, how many of you are currently planning to submit your application materials for a big grant or fellowship this year? And, how many of you are hoping to be successful so that you can finally secure the time to work on your research and your writing? Well, you’re probably in good company.
Lately, I’ve talked to quite a few professors and clients who are planning to apply for prestigious and well-known grants. This is a time-consuming process that entails the writing and refining of a good grant proposal, pulling together the requisite materials, obtaining recommendation letters, and working within the parameters of the application platform.
If you happen to be based in the United States, some of these applications are due at around the same time when you’re just getting started with the new academic year. Like, right now. So, it’s an add-on that you have to build in time for during an already busy schedule.
As you probably already know, grant writing usually involves a significant investment of time and labor. And after a long period of waiting to hear from the funding agency, it may or may not yield a positive result for you.
But one thing is for sure. If you don’t apply for the grant, you will certainly NOT receive it.
In this 27th episode of the Rise with Clarity Podcast, I’m going to be talking about applying for grants and fellowships as part of your life as an academic. And I want to reflect on the planning phase as well as setting expectations for yourself during the grant application season.
Winning a solo year-long fellowship can be important for so many reasons.
It can bring prestige to you and to your department.
It can relieve you of a year of teaching so that you can focus on writing and completing a book manuscript.
If you’re able to win a residential fellowship at an institute or at a humanities center, it can be really stimulating to be in conversation with other scholars as you develop and refine your ideas.
And for some professors, it can be a way of fashioning a paid sabbatical year to escape unbearable workloads and/or difficult departmental situations.
Now I just want to acknowledge that the grant application process is pretty different for those of you who are in STEM fields. Applying for large grants and fellowships is par for the course. And this process involves multiple stakeholders and collaborators, policy compliance, and higher stakes, overall. The continuation of your lab or your ability to hire graduate students or post-docs may in fact depend on your ability to secure large grants.
So grantsmanship is even more critical for scholars who are in the STEM fields.
Now what I’d like to talk about today is more directed to scholars who are in the humanities and the social sciences. If you’re a relatively new professor, and you’re thinking about applying for grants in the future, where do you even start?
8 Tips to Consider when Planning for Grant Applications:
1. If your campus has a faculty development office or an Office of Research that is open to faculty consultation, schedule an appointment.
You may receive guidance on grants that you are eligible for that you didn’t know about and you can also ask for sample winning proposals. The office might also have an e-mail list that you can join in order to receive information on upcoming grants and fellowships.
2. For some grants, you will first need to be appointed by your institution in order to even apply. In this case, getting to know your university’s administrator who handles these grants can be a useful strategy.
3. If you’re taking more of a DIY approach, spend an afternoon to figure out which grants and fellowships you will be applying for in the coming year. Create a spreadsheet or a simple word doc that lists all of the upcoming fellowships and their deadlines and the materials required for the application. And decide which grants you have the time and the energy to apply for this year.
4. Think carefully about who can serve as your references for each application. As you may guess, your letter writers who are senior scholars will most likely be swamped with their own work and dozens of other reference letter requests.
Having a strategically tailored letter as part of your application will make your case more persuasive. Thus, giving your letter writers a copy of your draft proposal and your updated CV as well as adequate time to prepare is important.
5. Carefully review the guidelines for each application. This may seem like a no brainer. But, I have actually been disqualified because I was 2 pages over the page count for the writing sample. That was really crushing to learn at the time. But I never made that mistake again!
The websites for the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) include a frequently asked questions section as well as sample winning proposals. Consult those websites. And quite a few funding agencies are now running webinars to go over application guidelines and FAQs.
6. If you still have questions, reach out to the program officers of funding agencies or institutes for further clarifications on the application.
7. Plan to create a draft of your proposal and receive feedback on it from experienced readers. You can ask mentors, colleagues, or even professional consultants for help on this.
Karen Kelsky’s The Professor Is In website has a link to a “Foolproof Grant Template” that is a great start to thinking about how to structure your proposal and how to articulate your research’s significance. And Betty Lai’s recently published The Grant Writing Guide: A Road Map for Scholars gives practical advice to grant writers in higher ed. I’ll go ahead and put links to those and other resources in the written transcript for this episode.
8. Try not to wait until the last minute to acquaint yourself with the application platform or portal to submit your materials. (I say this from having learned this the hard way!)
It can help to work on the application in stages, and to save your progress along the way. You also have some time to catch any errors or typos that would be embarrassing or grounds for disqualification.
Managing Your Expectations during Grant Application Season
Keep in mind that all of this takes time, strategy, and LUCK. You may decide that you’d be better off applying for certain grants at strategic points in your academic career.
Also, it can seem like you’re going to spend an awful lot of time writing about your future book without writing your actual book. I know I went through several grant application cycles in order to try and win a year-long fellowship so that I could work on my first book.
I came very close a few times (meaning that I was selected as an alternate twice and made it to a final round), but I was ultimately unsuccessful for the large national grants.
In the end, I was awarded a Hellman Fellowship to conduct research and a residential fellowship from the Humanities Institute at my first institution. I also received smaller grants for research and book subventions for my first book.
I eventually came to realize how fickle the evaluation process can sometimes be, after I became an advisory board member of the Humanities Institute and served on the review panel for annual grants and fellowships. This gave me an opportunity to see what it was like on the other side. It was illuminating.
Sometimes all reviewers agree that one candidate’s research proposal is truly outstanding and deserves to be funded. But a single comment from a senior scholar can sway opinion pretty quickly. And the vote can shift dramatically from what appeared on the original ranking sheet.
This is all to say that if you are not awarded a grant or a fellowship, don’t get too discouraged. The big national grants are extremely competitive and it’s probably a good idea to go in with a healthy mindset and to set your expectations. When the NEH says that they award grants to only 7% of the applicants, they mean it!
But beyond the goal of winning a grant, here are some other questions that I’d like to leave you with:
What do you hope to get out of the experience?
And how can developing a strong grant proposal assist you with communicating the ideas in your book?
What are you learning about your research project through this process?
Well, it’s my sincere wish that you can all receive funding for your research projects. And know that if you’d ever like to brainstorm about what grants to apply for in the coming year, I do offer 90-minute strategy sessions where you can come away with a game plan and timeline. You can find that information on my website, under Book a Strategy session.
