You sit down to write your grant proposal, and you focus on the science that you’re excited about. You write about how great it is, and you write about how it will revolutionize the field. You get the reviews back, and it is a rejection. This happens to you again, and again. The more grants you submit, the more rejections you accumulate.
What the he*##? How could your reviewers not get it? Why are they so damn clueless?
Listen.
I get it.
There was a time, not so long ago, when it was possible to follow your curiosity, define some interesting (to you) scientific problems to work on, then propose to work on them, and get funding to do so.
But in coming to take that vaunted time for granted, most of us have overlooked how exceptional it is to get paid just to play around with ideas in the science lab. That expectation is definitely not the historical norm.
Some great inventions and discoveries have come about from that ability to play around – but unfortunately, as a community we’ve done a poor job of communicating to the populace how much our science benefits them. Most people don’t understand that they wouldn’t have a phone, a computer, an internet, or many life-saving drugs without the science that’s been done over the past 100 years – much of it supported by government dollars. They just take these things for granted, very much like we have taken the steady stream of funding for granted.
This, combined with significantly changing economic circumstances, has made the idea that we can just get paid to play around in the lab more and more of a fantasy.
I talk to people day in and out who are struggling to get funding to support their labs and their science. I’ve talked to people who face critical tenure decisions, but just can’t get the grants they need for tenure. I’ve talked to a surprising number of people who feel like they are in a desperate downward spiral due to the brutality of the current environment.
Yet despite these struggles, the advice most of these people keep hearing from peers is – “just do better science” or “just submit more grants.” I recently heard about one department chair denigrating a younger colleague for taking a grant writing class – as if this was an indicator that the young person’s science wasn’t good enough, so he had to make up for it with better grant writing. (Smirk)
Folks, that is naïve Fantasy-Island talk. Yes, in those former times of Fantasy-Island science funding, mostly all that mattered was doing great science. People could get by without classes on grant writing. They could get by pursuing what interested them most, and writing “decent” grants about it. That was enough. But no longer.
That chairman can poke fun at grant writing classes – but in the end, if he keeps thinking like that, he too will get caught up in the fallacy that “good science” is enough. He too will end up in the group of people I talk to for whom suddenly the grants begin drying up – and for whom desperation rapidly sets in.
The world has changed for us. The people believing in and teaching the old model are being taken out, one by one. I’ve seen it happen to many colleagues. No, I’m not happy about it, but it is the reality. We have to deal with it.
In the old model, it was all about you pursuing your interests in science.
In the new model, it is not about you, it is about your customer and their interests.
This is a fundamental shift – you can’t just come up with what you think is a great idea and say: I’m going to go get this funded. You have to define who your customer is (your funding agency and peers), and then figure out what they want. Then you have to match your idea to what it is that they want. In other words, grant writing is not about you, it is about them.
It doesn’t matter whether you prefer the old Fantasy Island model to the current model. The tides of history do not care – they just are. You can either adapt, or perish.
This is a hard shift for many of us to get. We were not taught to think about our customers – we were taught how to do science.
But the reality is, this is what increasingly separates those who sink from those who swim. There are a lot of people who can do great science (probably too many, given the economic circumstances – which is truly unfortunate). But there are not many people who can do great science, and then figure out how to translate that to meet the needs of their “customers”. It is for much the same reason that only about 1 in 5 startup businesses succeed – they fail to provide what the market wants when it wants it. Yet there are those 1 in 5 that make it – and sometimes make it big. Reality is harsh, and fickle to boot.
If you can figure out how to do great science that fits your customer’s needs, it will transform your ability to get your science funded.
The first step in the process is to stop thinking about you and your wants, and start getting into the mode of thinking about what others in your field (especially your funders) want. Then, once you’ve identified that, figure out how you can provide it (realistically and innovatively).
If you’d like a series of free videos on grant writing and a complimentary, in-depth grant strategy session with me, sign up over at: http://grantdynamo.com/get-started/
