Do you need personalized help to overcome a grant writing challenge that you have? Do you need insightful, unbiased, and constructively critical mentorship that you can’t find at your own institution? Need help figuring out how to successfully apply for a faculty job?
I am making my services available on a limited basis to problem solve with you on these types of career hurdles. 4/6/10: Please note, the demand for consulting was beyond my expectations, so I am unable to accept additional consulting clients for April or May 2010. If/when I resume taking on clients, I will prioritize requests from students who have participated in my online grant writing course, since I find that working with people who’ve gone through the course is much more efficient for everyone involved.
I will not write your grant or your CV for you – there are other services around for grant writing. I don’t have time for that, I have my own proposals to write.
Instead, I’ll work with you to improve your own writing/presentation skills in a lasting way that impacts not only your present proposals, but the future ones you work on as well.
Why critical and independent advice is essential to success
Finding authentic mentorship that has a lasting impact on you is hard. I’ve been there.
I have asked for advice from many people along the way, and many were generous with their time. But only a rare few have been able to use that time effectively to provide the critical and insightful help that has impacted my career in a positive and lasting way.
Many colleagues are just too nice to give the needed feedback. But grant writing is not a “nice” activity. When you are competing for hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars, and you have 1 in 10 chances of getting those dollars for your research, there is no such thing as “nice.”
Grant reviewers will not be “nice” to you. So when you’re seeking critical feedback from colleagues as you’re developing a proposal, having people be nice is not helpful.
I used to enjoy giving my work to a colleague and getting it back with only minor changes along with hopeful encouragement, “it looks great!” I could pat myself on the back. Until I got the rejection letter.
As I described in one of my blog posts, the first time I encountered a colleague who was truly and deeply critical of my work, I was shocked and angry. This was fairly late in the game for my career, after I already had a faculty position. Only later did I come to realize that his critical feedback was a turning point for me.
From then on, I have written far better proposals than I did previously. Many of them have been funded, but even for the ones that weren’t, I have had confidence that what I was submitting conveyed quality work.
Good feedback is the kind that makes you sad or angry
A few years back I was collaborating with someone on an R01 proposal. After some time working on it, my colleague sent me a draft. I took my honed and critical scalpel to the draft, and sent it back full of red ink and critical suggestions.
At first, my colleague seemed rather angry at me. I’m not sure that this person had never received such direct and critical feedback. For a while the person wasn’t talking to me.
But after a week or so, the person overcame the initial reactions, contacting me to ask for help rewriting some parts of the proposal.
After several more rounds like that, we submitted that proposal, and it was funded on the first round of submission, in a highly competitive research area. My colleague was very surprised that it as funded without a round (or two) of revision. I wasn’t.
When you submit a proposal, you’re going to get the critical feedback, one way or another. If you wait until the feedback comes from your grant reviewers, you will have two problems:
1. You have now used up one of your limited chances at getting your proposal funded. The NIH now restricts you to two rounds of submission for any proposal, then you have to start over. Do you want to waste one of those rounds for naught?
2. Your grant reviewers often do not have the time nor inclination to help you make your proposal better. Often the reasons they list for giving a poor score are only surface-level excuses for rejection. It is not that they are being deceitful, it is just that it takes hard work to drill down into why a given proposal doesn’t work. A grant reviewer has no incentive for helping you improve the deeper structure of your proposal. And so, usually, they don’t.
My help is only available to people who really want it
For that reason, I’m charging $250 per hour for consulting, or $1,000 for a complete grant review with up two rounds of back-and-forth discussion.
You may be surprised at the price. I know I would be. But hear me out for the reasons on this:
1. I’m a rather busy person. My time is highly prized, and my UNC job pays well. Last year I brought in well over a million dollars worth of grants, which consumed a huge amount of time. Plus I have young kids at home that I want to spend some time with. I co-own a bike shop that consumes time as well. I also spend a lot of time working with the people in my own lab, and I don’t want to give them short shrift. Therefore, I can’t afford to do this for just anyone, and so I have to charge a rate that makes it worthwhile.
2. If you’re serious about getting a large grant for your lab (like an R01), or getting a good faculty position, a few hundred (or even a few thousand) dollars is small change if my help gets you more quickly to your goal. For your grants, I can’t guarantee that you’ll be funded on the first round – or even funded at all. But I can guarantee that I will help you improve your proposal from what it otherwise would have been. You get what you pay for.
3. Through this blog, I have the opportunity to have a wide impact on many young scientists’ careers (see my page on why I’m doing this). Any time I spend on individual help and consulting will take away from the limited time I have to spend on the blog. Therefore, I have to properly balance the my time between the activities.
4. The income I receive from consulting will go to support my efforts here. This is all being maintained with my own resources, not those from UNC. I want to keep this as a truly independent effort, so that if I end up somewhere besides UNC in the future, this effort doesn’t die.
5. This is the most important reason: that you are far more likely to take my input seriously if you have to pay to get it. Human psychology is weird, because people almost never value that which is free as much as that which they pay for. I figure that if you’re serious enough to pay hundreds of dollars or more for my help/advice/input, then you are going to value (and take seriously) the feedback more than you would if it were free.
As this site develops, I expect it will consume an increasing amount of my time, and so I am likely to increase my rates (or remove the consulting offer altogether). If you are thinking about it, take advantage of it now.
If this is outside of your budget range, keep an eye out on my subscriber’s list for an upcoming online course I will be offering (haven’t subscribed to the list yet? there are many reasons to do so, and it is free).
Why me?
Reason number one is my track record. In the past 4 years, I’ve had three of my competitive R01′s funded on the first round of submission with scores better than the 7th percentile ranking. I had another one funded on the second round at around the 7th percentile. I received a rare RC2 “grand opportunities” award. I have helped multiple collaborators and colleagues formulate winning proposals. I know what it takes.
But, please be aware, your science has to be good. That is the platform on which grant success is built. If your science isn’t good to begin with, hiring me to help with developing your proposal writing is probably going to be a waste of my time and your money. If you are in that situation, I am happy to consult with you about how to improve your science if you need it.
One way to judge whether your science is ready for my help is by looking at your publications. If you want to do a proposal in an area for which you have no publications, you are going to face an uphill battle. You need to first establish a reputation in your area with one or more good quality publications. Then you are ready for grant writing help.
I’ve tried doing it the other way around – submitting proposals before establishing a reputation in a given area. Every single one of my failures to get a grant funded in the past five years can be traced directly to that single problem.
So, if you are ready, I can help you take it to the next level, to transform you from a point of constantly struggling into a position of constant success. How much is that worth?
Action steps and satisfaction guarantee
If you want to enlist me, here are a few details.
Your university or company will likely have a way of hiring a consultant, using start-up funds or other similar resources. Sometimes the paperwork may take time to complete, so start early.
If you hire me for a compete grant review consult, it comes with a satisfaction guarantee. I cannot guarantee that your proposal will be funded. But I can guarantee that your proposal will improve, and that you will learn some important things that you can apply in the future. If you honestly don’t feel that you got any value from my time, just contact me within 30 days after the consultation, and I’l refund your money.
What if you are a graduate student or post doc who cannot afford my one-on-one coaching?
There is another very inexpensive (i.e. free) way to get some help: subscribe to my list, then drop me a line with your questions about grant writing or proposal writing, and if you agree that I can answer your question publicly on the blog, I may just answer it. I won’t put any of your personal details on the blog, but I do want to use questions that I get as teaching tools for a wider audience.
As the blog grows in popularity, I suspect that it will be much more difficult to gain my attention to your question, since my time is already stretched thin. So don’t wait – ask those questions now.