Dr. Karen is on vacation in Italy July 2012. During that time she is re-posting older blog posts her regular Tuesday and Thursday posting days. She’ll recommence new posting some time in August.
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Unveiled here: Karen’s Famous and Foolproof Research Proposal Template.
This Research Proposal Template has won hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money for multiple graduate students and scholars in the social sciences and humanities over the past 15 years.
You may share, but please credit Dr. Karen Kelsky of The Professor Is In, http://theprofessorisin.com).
Let’s walk through this step by step.
The first step is to identify what large general topic of wide interest that your specific project relates to. These are topics that anyone, including your grandmother or someone sitting next to you on a plane, would say, “oh, yes, that’s an important topic.” Examples include: immigration, sustainable energy, changes in the family, curing cancer, new social technologies, environmental degradation, global warming, etc. Until you can identify a really broadly interesting theme that your project relates to, you will never be successful in applying for grants.
This is because your application must *excite* the readers, and the readers are likely from a range of different disciplines. They will not all be interested in your discipline’s narrow debates. They want to know that your work and your intellectual and scholarly vision are wide, and broad, and encompassing.
Once you have established your wide, much debated, topic, you then identify two bodies of literature relevant to your own training that dealt with this topic.
If you are an anthropologist, and your research is on Haitian communities in New York City, for example, you will start by pointing to the wide debates on immigration in America. Then you will write, “scholars in many fields have addressed these important questions. Within cultural anthropology, scholars such as xxx, xxx, and xxx have all explored the role of cultural beliefs in shaping immigrant communities. Within Caribbean Studies, meanwhile, scholars such as xxx, xxx, and xxx have focused on the specific demographic and economic trends which have fueled outward migration.”
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This brief survey will be no more than 3 sentences long. And indeed all of the above must be done in two paragraphs and no more. Complain, claim that it is “impossible,” and then get it down to two paragraphs. Because it is only the Introduction to the “Kicker” Sentence, the axis on which your entire appeal for funding rests. And the Kicker Sentence must be on the first page.
The Kicker is your “HOWEVER” sentence. The “however” sentence is the crux and the anchor of your entire proposal.
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It reads like this:
“However, none of these works have addressed the central question of XXXXXXXX.”
XXXXXXX in this case is YOUR view of what is most essential to an accurate understanding of the big topic, but which has never to date been studied by anyone else.
This brings you to the GAP IN KNOWLEDGE: “Despite much excellent work on themes such as XXX and XXX, scholars examining the transformations in immigration in America have not yet fully explored the importance of XXXX in creating and sustaining these communities.”
Now for the URGENCY:
“Yet, without such an understanding, we are left with an inadequate analysis that creates the condition for ill-informed policy decisions and a self-sustaining cycle of misunderstanding and resentment….”
Now for the HERO NARRATIVE.
“This study will remedy this gap in the literature by examining the class and racial politics of an immigrant Haitian community in New York City in order to more fully elucidate the heretofore unrecognized relationships between XXX and XXXX in one highly contested immigrant context. “
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Remember, YOU are the HERO who is going to save us from ourselves and our inadvertant but devastating ignorance about the true significance of XXX!
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This is immediately followed by a CONCRETE AND UNMISTAKABLE STATEMENT OF YOUR RESEARCH PROJECT (One of the most common grant proposal mistakes is to never include a single and foregrounded, easily identified sentence encapsulating your research project) :
” I am applying to the XXX Foundation to support the completion of my dissertation on XXX. Through a close and fine-grained analysis of XXX, I will show that in contrast to previous assumptions, in fact immigrant communities are XXXXXX.”
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The rest of the essay then provides substantiating evidence. In other words, concrete evidence that the project is doable, by you, according to reasonable and well thought out disciplinary methods and timeline.
SPECIFICS: This is one to two paragraphs of more specific information about the background, context, history, and limitations of the research. This demonstrates that you’ve looked into the project thoroughly and are familiar with it from several angles.
LITERATURE REVIEW: This builds on the very brief references in the first paragraph, and demonstrates that you have, in fact, read the major literature related to this topic. All citations must be complete and correct. Zero tolerance for misspellings or typos. All sources MUST, without exception, be listed on the attached bibliography.
METHODOLOGY: These are the specific methods that you will use to conduct the research. These differ by discipline.
TIMELINE: This is a month-by-month (or week-by-week) plan of research. What will you do when? Be specific! Name dates!
BUDGET: This is a general list of costs and any already committed funding sources. Break down your legitimate research expenses, including lab supplies, field supplies, travel both large and small, books and materials, internet or computer access fees, etc.
All of this substantiating evidence is meant to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you will CORRECTLY UTILIZE the grant money once you receive it.
Finally, you cannot finish without a STRONG CONCLUSION. Even one sentence suffices, but do NOT neglect to include it. It may read like this: “I expect this research to contribute to debates on XXXXX and play an important role in shaping debates on XXXX and XXXX in the coming years.”
This Conclusion demonstrates that you are a master of both the micro and the macro implications of your project. You have an unassailable timeline and budget, but you also have your eye on the wider scholarly world and your role in it.
Do all of this, my friends, and you will walk away with generous, abundant funding for your every project. You will have the leisure to do the best work, and the best work will in turn legitimize you for the next major grant for which you apply. You will be on the “GRANT GRAVY TRAIN“, and that is the key to the most successful academic careers.
Dear Karen,
Do you have a “foolproof” book proposal template? Or any advice re: the process of revising the dissertation into the book?
Thanks,
Maria
Maria, thanks for reading. I don’t have one written up on a one-page schematic!! But I can definitely write a blog post about that this week because it’s a HUGE topic and one that is so critical to people on the humanities and social science side of academic careers. Let me ask, what’s your field and topic? I’ll keep that in mind as I write it.
I work in literature, in particular 19c British.
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Where do I start? I don’t know the first thing about grants but would like to help my physics professor get one. Thanks!
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That’s not how I got my Guggenheim…..but hey, whatever works.
There is no “Janet Gold” listed on the Guggenheim roster of fellows, nor is there one listed on your website’s bio, so I am confused by your remark.
That’s because I don’t write comments on this site under my real name. I write more freely when I’m anonymous. There are lots of Janet Golds, many of them with web sites, but I’m not one of them. I truly received a Guggenheim, and it made a wonderful difference in my life. I’m grateful for it and have “given back” to the Foundation. A few years back I had coffee with the then-director, Ed Hirsch, at an east side club whose name I’ve forgotten. I don’t suppose any of this ‘proves’ that I received a Guggenheim, but you’ll have to take my word for it that I did. I thank the Foundation in the book published as a result of its support.
PS
I think it might have been the Lotos Club where we had our coffee…
I believe that any senior scholar who does not comment under their own name is a coward.
Tch tch, name-calling! Au contraire: this way I have complete freedom.
To be an asshole.
Oh and btw, ‘Janet Gold’ will be marked as spam from today.
Are you serious? Karen, I am surprised by this thread. Just because someone got a grant without following your framework, doesn’t make them an asshole. Neither does their commenting without using their own name — this is standard on online forums. On the contrary, you are the one that looks unprofessional.
Thank you for this! I have been very successful in getting small grants for field research with a very similar organizational scheme, and it’s wonderful to have it spelled out so clearly. I’m going to post this in our grad lab so that all of us will hopefully get the funding we need.
I love you. That is all.
Hello Karen,
I highly appreciate your help in grant writing. I am noticing that this formula – broad scope, problem, hero narrative – is actually something that we also use in biology – and is probably used everywhere to market science. I want to point you and others (who might be interested) to the guideline on constructing a paper abstract suitable for Nature. It follows a very similar structure.
http://www.cbs.umn.edu/sites/default/files/public/downloads/Annotated_Nature_abstract.pdf
For me as a fresh PhD those things are very interesting! I will use your formula for my next grant proposal!
As I graduate student, I have been starring at the same blank Microsoft Word document for days trying to remake a not winning proposal into something more successful. I read this and it is suddenly totally clear why I didn’t win before and how I should reshape to proposal. Thank you so much much for your posts!
You’re very welcome!
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Thank you for this website! I have had a winding road in academia because there are so many unspoken rules that are not written anywhere. I had to find out the hard way a few times, but now I have a process for finding the information I need in order to succeed. Anyway, I appreciate you making visible the very things that remain invisible in academia.
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Thank you for your very clear description and advice on writing proposals. Like Juan B, I have been staring at my so not winning proposal for days and just despairing until I read your post. Your crystallization of the idea of grant proposal as “Hero narrative” clicked with me and now I actually ‘get’ the purpose of writing one! Thank you!
I followed this template for my proposal, and showed my Ph.D. supervisor a draft of it. He laughed and said it looked like I followed some model on the Internet – that it was a dime-a-dozen. I wonder if you have been too successful Karen, in spreading good practice
there will inevitably be backlash from those profs who want to preserve the aura of mystique and inaccessibility around academic pursuits. They are the ones who call my kind of professionalization advice “gaming the system.” But the fact is, any proposal that articulates a project clearly and concisely and answers all necessary questions is a winning proposal, and that’s what the template accomplishes with a minimum of fuss and bother.
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The grant template is a Thing of Beauty and if it has helped me obtain funding as a new TT asst. prof., think what it can do for those at earlier stages of grant-writing. There are, in fact, hoops to jump through and ‘games’ to play if you want to get a job in this harrowing, take-no-prisoners market and the advice on this blog is smart, savvy and quite literally on the money. Thank you, Dr. Karen!
Karen, thanks for providing this clear and persuasive grant model. You mention some of the broad issues that one’s research might impact: “immigration, sustainable energy, changes in the family, curing cancer, new social technologies, environmental degradation, global warming, etc.” but for much of the research in fields like mine, art history, the link to these pressing societal issues is not as direct as it might be in the social sciences or sciences. Perhaps you have some examples where you helped clients broaden the scope of the appeal of their humanities field-specific research? If you can find the time, please provide some examples of how to make humanities grant applications more relevant to broader, contemporary issues. Thanks again!
I always tell clients (partic. in the Grant-writing Webinar) that many of us work on fairly obscure, narrow topics, and that’s ok! You don’t have to relate your work on 14th Century Aquitanian courtly poetry to global warming to make it relevant! Just make sure that you start at the most pressing and wide current question animating the field of medieval French lit, or maybe courtly poetry, so that people get intrigued by the qustion first, and then read on to your specific topic.
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Hi Karen,
Thanks for a great template. If a grant application asks for a relatively brief (c. 1000 words) statement, would you suggest cutting any of these sections, and if so, which ones? Or would you advise keeping all sections and reducing the length of each?
Thanks for your help!
Just to clarify: the grant committee asks for a separate budget and itinerary. If that’s the case, can you strike them from the statement itself?
Dr. Karen;
What advice do you suggest for medievalists when spinning a “General Topic of Wide Interest.” How does one compete for grants that are also accessible to modernists who can much more easily tap into contemporary issues?
This is always a challenge in fields like yours, but just aim for something of broad scholarly thematic interest, rather than the narrow topical focus, if that makes sense. ie, a theme that is shared across temporal periods, if possible.
Thank goodness for this!!! I am a novice at writing proposals. I have no letters behind my name and want to ask for funding for a women’s help and support center. I had NO IDEA where to even start when I found this template. For someone like me and my merry band of neighborhood do gooders, do you have any more advice?? Again thank you for this template.
Hi Karen,
I owe you a huge big “thank you” for this grant template, so commenting here to pay my dues. I followed your advice to refine my grant essay, and won a Mellon grant this year, besides a baby grant ($1000) last year
The Mellon will make life sweet indeed, since it is a total game changer. They notified me two days ago, and I am still over the moon.
Overall, I applied to 4 grants over the last year–2 Mellons (big ones), another big one, and a baby one. Won 1 Mellon and 1 baby. That’s a 50% success rate, but yep, happy enough.
Also, I used feedback from wherever I could get it. Some of the grants where I was unsuccessful applying sent along very helpful reviewer comments that helped me refine my proposal further when applying to the next ones. My university had a grants review opportunity set up. Of course I showed my advisor and some committee members. And I used the grant template here, hero narrative and all, throughout.
I’m commenting anonymously since I’m just a lowly graduate student. But just wanted to say that I’ve found many of your blog posts super helpful in cultivating a sense of what is needed in our career trajectories in general (long term as well as short term). Also, apart from this template, your CV writing post is tres helpful.
Thank you once again!
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Excellent synopsis. I have been accepted into a PhD program for fall 2013. I am so excited to pursue my PhD and glad to have found you on FB. This template also comes in very handy for me as director of sponsored research and programs at another university where I work. I will certainly give credit where credit is due when I share this with them.
Thanks so much!
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Would you recommend this template for a fellowship? I will be applying for a post-doctoral fellowship for my junior sabbatical that is discipline specific and that comes with a standard package/stipend (thus the budget aspect seems less necessary). This template seems like it would work for that too with a few tweaks…
yes it does; you can always leave off any elements that don’t work for the application. For a postdoc, the timeline is particularly important.