On the Five Stages of Proposal Writing

I’m preparing to dust off a proposal that was rejected six months ago. It’s a resubmission to the National Science Foundation. In such cases the word submission is particularly apt. When NSF is funding less than 10% of the proposals it receives, one is pretty much resigned to one or more rewrites before you have a chance at funding. And since you often have only one or two chances a year to submit a proposal for 3-5 years of work, well, one doesn’t have to be a whiz on the quantitative side to see proposal writing as a lovely lesson in the brevity of all things mortal.

But I digress.

While dwelling on such things existential it was great to come across FemaleScienceProfessor’s take on the the process of writing a grant proposal. What emerges is the notion that successful grants have to be in some way transformative, that their writing is not linear but aggregative, that much of it has to do with juggling budgets and filling out forms, and that, when it’s all over (after months of nurturing the baby that you then unceremoniously kick out of the nest), well….I’ll let her do the honors…

And then.. someone in the grants office pushes a button and the proposal is gone. I get an automated email. I am relieved, but there is also a melancholy feeling of emptiness at the departure of the proposal out of my intellectual grasp. What will I do next? I contemplate cleaning my office, but I don’t actually do it.

FSP is a worthwhile blog. Check it out.

See also:

10 steps toward better grant writing

5 ways of dealing with that rejected manuscript

Another GTDA haiku

Five chunks of career advice from Dan Pink

Daniel Pink is a keen observer of the changing workplace and its implications for the way we think about, and train for, our careers. His A Whole New Mind describes the challenges and opportunities in the transition from an “information age”-based economy to a “conceptual age”-based economy.

Now, in The Adventures of Johnny Bunko Pink has created a comic full of advice for college graduates as they prepare to enter the world of business. It is a joy to read. The manga illustrations of Rob Ten Pas give one a new appreciation of this art form. It is also meant to be digested in one sitting, and there is enough good stuff that, upon completion, you feel as if you’ve just eaten a tasty bag of nacho cheese Doritos, only to discover they are 0-fat and full of protein.

Get yourself a copy and pass it among your colleagues. It ought to spur some healthy conversation. Below the fold, I translate some of Johnny Bunko’s life lessons to the world of grad school, with a wee bit of commentary.

One project: one project log

Lab scientists are all over the concept of keeping a laboratory notebook. This is your one-stop summary of a given project, from near-conception through publication. We field biologists, not trained at the lab bench (which tends to be conveniently flat and relatively protected from rainstorms, mud, and leeches) often find ourselves compiling the notes and assorted detritus associated with a given project in computer folders, desk drawers, and refrigerators.

Which is not to say that, at the very least, a logbook, or diary, isn’t extraordinarily useful when you find yourself juggling a variety of projects.

My protocol is to open a new file, named “_Log_projectname” in Word or (now) Omni Outliner–any program that allows you to timestamp a given entry.  The “_” at the beginning of the name is an old trick to make sure this file sits at the top of the folder, along with the manuscript files, figures, data files, etc.

Then, whenever you do something substantive on that project, you make a dated entry describing what you did. My rule of thumb?  If you open up the manuscript, work on a figure, add new data, or perform some analysis, that deserves an entry.

As an added bonus, at the end of that entry,  type out a few of the next steps you foresee in turning that project into published manuscript.

Once you have this habit down–opening up, and adding to, a “_Log” file for every project–you can confidently set it aside for a short time to work on something else. When you return, just read the “_Log” file from beginning to end to get yourself back up to speed.

Just don’t wait too long…

5 ways to exercise your analytical chops

Creativity is a about freely generating new ideas and culling 99% of them. The end product of creativity is thus new, useful ideas.

One’s quality as a scientist is a product of these two abilities.

Some folks are so hyper-critical of any new idea that nothing leaves their notebook. Even writing a paragraph becomes an excruciating ordeal, as any abstraction is ruthlessly worried and excised.

Some folks fill their notebooks with idea after idea, but end up swallowed up in the thicket unable to commit to any one idea for long (sort of an intellectual ADHD). Consider this post a dose of analytical Ritalin, prescribed by the good Dr. Tufte.

Edward Tufte is someone every beginning scientist should get to know. His Visual Display of Quantitative Information is the best introduction to the theory and practice of effective graphics. His website includes a bulletin board on all topics analytical, graphical, aesthetic, and concrete. The site’s only downside is that it can swallow Friday afternoons whole if you let it.

In short, Tufte is the paragon of GTDA’s guiding principle:

Quality = great content*great design.

Here is the opening salvo (plus my commentary) from his “Advice for effective analytical reasoning.”

Will you earn your Ph. D.?

An interesting post from the political science blog The Monkey Cage. Some folks at Syracuse University looked for the best predictors of graduate student success in their Economics program, using as data the records of their past students.

The upshot: the best predictor of passing comps: your GRE scores, having an M. A. degree, and having an economics major.

However, the best predictors of completing the Ph. D. program were different. They combined something very concrete–a student’s preparation in mathematics, with something far more intangible–the strength of their research motivation, as gleaned from the personal statements in their application to grad school.

My take, for what’s it worth.

In most programs, your written and oral comprehensive exam tests your mastery of a set of material, and, indirectly, the work habits that allow you to teach yourself.

But there is a reason grad school is often described as a process of transformation from someone who reads to someone who is read.

Because the second hurdle is the ability to design, and analyze novel research. This takes a mastery of logic (and mathematics is, at its heart, logical calisthenics) and a stubborn drive to see a project through. Those students who work on mastering the literature, but avoid the often lonely process of designing, collecting, and cranking methodically through data and manuscripts, risk the scarlet ABD of academia–All But Dissertation.

We’ll be spending some time in the upcoming posts working on your analytical chops. But in the meantime, don’t skimp on math. Even if your dissertation never requires matrix algebra or integration and differentiation, studying math trains your mind to think clearly.

On leaving MS Word for cleaner pastures

My mini-rant against Microsoft Word prompted reader Sasha to suggest looking into Scrivener. Now wouldn’t you know it, Virginia Heffernen has a nice article on cheesey little website about her move away from the Redmond empire.  It links to a nice essay by Steven Poole on the same topic.

The upshot of both: the process of creative, synthetic writing is largely divorced from the process of formatting mass-produced documents. Our job as academic scientists is not to write memos, but manuscripts. Why not find software that gently removes the distractions, and lets you, and your words, flow? 

Flowcharts, how do I love thee?

I haven’t used flowcharts much in my teaching or research, but this may change soon. First, there is this marvelous mashup of flowcharts with web pages to teach copyright law. Biologists have long used keys to simplify identifying critters, but I can easily imagine using flowcharts to teach, for example, the experimental results that would allow you to identify different kinds of population regulation.

Perhaps the real utility of flowcharts for graduate students may lie in the underused but powerful practice of Strong Inference. SI endorses building a logic tree when planning your research so that each experiment tests as many different hypotheses as possible. The end result is that each experiment produced maximum bang for your research buck. I am seeing more and more flowcharts in the NSF grants I review.

How would you flowchart your dissertation research?

Finally, flowcharts are effective ways of detecting patterns in otherwise seemingly inscrutable behavior.

Add this one to your toolbar

Check out Cross Engine, a meta-search engine with a great interface that is also, amazingly, blazing fast. Choose the media (Web, Images, Video, News, Reference, Blogs) and/or particular websites.

ht LifeHacker

5 steps to capturing and storing your ideas

An an academic, you need a system to effectively capture and curate your ideas. Such systems are infinitely flexible–part of the fun is playing around with different components until you find a set that fits you. That said, I suspect that the following components are pretty much universal in any such system:

you need a means of capturing an idea anywhere,

you need centralized, temporary storage,

you need an arena for right-brain and left-brain play,

you need long-term storage.

We’ll spend time over the next couple of weeks examining each of these in more detail; consider this the opening chapter.

OK, here’s my system in, of course, 5 parts:

QOTD: Richard Feynman

“What is the use of discovering the age of the universe? Or, what are these quasars that are exploding? I mean what’s the use of all that astronomy? There isn’t any. Its curiosity that I’m satisfying. If human curiosity represents a need, then the attempt to satisfy curiosity is practical, by definition. I would not put out any promise that it would be practical in some economic sense.”

From The pleasure of finding things out

Feynman is a hero. But at the same time, when the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and we are being paid on the public dime, do we have some obligation to carve out some of our research time toward fixing some of the world’s problems?

Discuss amongst yourselves.