Exercises — Chapter 27: Grant Writing for Academic Researchers

Work these with your own (real or intended) academic career in mind. The aim is to think like a program-builder playing a long game, not a researcher chasing one grant at a time.

How to use these: Part A checks recall; Part B applies the chapter to concrete career-funding decisions; Part C asks you to create at a real researcher's level (a funding arc, a training plan); Part M interleaves earlier chapters. Answers to selected exercises (★) are in the back matter.

Part A — Recall and Understand

A1. ★ State the chapter's threshold concept in your own words. How does program-thinking differ from project-thinking?

A2. Sketch the academic funding arc by career stage, naming a mechanism for each stage.

A3. What is the early-career preliminary-data problem, and name three ways to solve it.

A4. ★ What makes a mentored career (K) award different from a research grant, and why is the training plan a "proposal within a proposal"?

A5. Define: fellowship, K award, K99/R00, ESI status, research program, bridge funding, sponsor/mentor.

A6. Explain the conflict between the tenure clock and the grant clock, and what it requires of early-career researchers.

A7. Why is the shift to the PI identity a "multiplication" of scholarship rather than a betrayal of it?

Part B — Apply

B1. ★ Match the mechanism. For each researcher, name the most appropriate mechanism and why: - (a) A doctoral student needing dissertation funding. - (b) A postdoc wanting to ease the transition to an independent faculty position. - (c) A new faculty member needing protected time and mentored training to launch independence. - (d) An established investigator continuing a productive line of work.

B2. Program or project? A researcher considers three possible next grants. Describe how program-thinking (vs. project-thinking) would change which they choose and why.

B3. ★ Solve the data problem. A new assistant professor has a strong R01 idea but little preliminary data and a ticking tenure clock. Lay out a concrete strategy to get from here to a funded R01.

B4. The two clocks. Explain why a new faculty member should start writing grants before they feel "ready," using the tenure-clock/grant-clock conflict and the A1.

B5. Pipeline discipline. A PI's current grant is going well and funded for two more years. Why should they be writing the next grant now, not later?

Part C — Analyze and Create

C1. ★ Map your funding arc. Using the Section 27.4 checkpoint, map your trajectory: current stage and mechanism, the next 2–3 stages, the research program they all advance, the preliminary data each needs, and (if relevant) a career-award training-plan sketch. This goes in your "My Proposal" document.

C2. Name your program. Articulate, in 2–3 sentences, the larger research program your career advances (or would) — the sustained question that defines your scholarly identity — and show how 2–3 specific grants would each advance it.

C3. ★ Draft a training plan. For a career award, draft a one-page career-development plan: career goal, development goals and how you'll achieve them, mentorship structure, milestones to independence, and the integration of research and development. Use the Section 27.4 model.

C4. Internal-funding strategy. Identify (or research) the internal/seed funding at your institution and design a plan to use it to generate preliminary data for a future external grant. Explain the leverage.

C5. Pipeline plan. Sketch a three-year grant-writing pipeline for yourself: what you'd have in preparation, submitted, under review, and being revised at any given time, so funding never lapses.

Part M — Mixed and Interleaved Review

M1. ★ (Ch 26 + 27) How does stewardship-is-the-next-application (Chapter 26) become, across a career, the program-building of this chapter?

M2. (Ch 16 + 27) Map the NIH mechanism arc and the match-the-mechanism threshold (Chapter 16) onto the academic funding arc by career stage.

M3. ★ (Ch 22 + 27) Why is planning for the A1 resubmission especially urgent for an early-career academic, given the tenure clock?

M4. (Ch 6 + 27) How does the specific aims page (Chapter 6) serve program-building — can a strong aims page convey a program, not just a project?

M5. (Ch 23 + 27) How does the academic arc eventually lead to collaborative and center grants (Chapter 23), and how does a research program set that up?

M6. (Ch 17 + 27) Compare the NSF CAREER award's research-education integration (Chapter 17) with the K award's research-training-plan integration. What's the shared principle?

🪞 Metacognitive check-in. If you're early-career, did the program mindset feel premature — or did you start to see how thinking about your program now, even loosely, would shape better choices? The most successful researchers were program-thinkers from early on, when their "program" was just an emerging question. Notice whether you've been chasing individual grants or building toward something coherent. The shift to program-thinking, made early, is what turns a career's worth of grants into a body of work.