Planning your application

What is this grant for?

The GRFP arrives at an awkward moment. You are either leaving a lab, entering a new one, or rotating through three of them, and you are being asked to write a research proposal as though you already know where you will spend the next five years. You don’t, and that is uncomfortable.

Almost all of that discomfort dissolves once you accept the premise the program is built on: the GRFP funds a person, not a project. It exists to support you as a researcher and to give you some independence in how you use that support. Winning it does not obligate you to join the lab you wrote about. I didn’t.

So the proposal is not a contract. It is evidence — evidence that you are the kind of person who could design and carry out work like this. From a reviewer’s seat, that comes down to four things:

1. A well-designed project. The question is worth asking and the plan is thought through.
2. Intellectual Merit. You can actually do it, given your past experience and the resources available to you.
3. Broader Impacts. You show real initiative toward helping the people around you and getting scientific knowledge out into the world.
4. A well-organized application. Boring, and it counts.

Hold onto this framework while you write. It will help you focus on compiling your application and alleviate confusion and guilt regarding making commitments towards a specific lab.

Which lab should I write my statements for?

This depends on you and on the relationships you already have. The premise above does most of the work here: because the award follows you rather than the project, you are choosing a lab to write with, not a lab to be bound to.

If you are an undergraduate. You should be either in a lab you have a strong relationship with, or in close contact with a lab where you might plausibly do graduate work. This lab does not have to be where you end up. Ideally, you will choose a lab where your recommenders will be the strongest and the PI will be willing and eager to help design a prospective project with you. If they won’t, that tells you something useful about whether you should write the grant for their lab. But designing projects for students and grants is a large part of the job, so most PIs will.

If you are a first-year graduate student. Rotations make this messier. Given the October deadline, the ideal case is that you are currently rotating in the lab you most want to join, so that PI can write you an informed letter. If that’s not where you are, reach out to the lab you feel passionate about as early as possible. For what it’s worth, I wrote my GRFP while rotating in a lab I didn’t end up joining — the lines here are not so clean.

Whichever lab you write about: for the two months prior to the deadline, convince yourself it’s your final destination. Otherwise you’ll write the whole application against a low background hum of second-guessing which hurts your motivation and progress.

Coming up with a research proposal

If you are new to a field, you will need someone to point you at its frontier. That is what your PI is for. Work with a PI who can meet with you at least once a week to work through drafts. Also, get the PI involved early — they will help guide the direction of the proposal and direct you towards papers in the field that you should be reading as the idea takes shape.

It is your responsibility to familiarize yourself with the requirements of the grant. They may cut a sentence you put in specifically to satisfy Intellectual Merit or Broader Impacts, because from their side it reads as filler. It is your job to know why each puzzle piece is being included and defend it. The MIT guides linked at the bottom of this page will help you make that case.

There are also structural rules for a GRFP proposal that are important to pick up on. You can learn them from reading sample statements (see Resources below), and some of them carry over to the general rules of grant writing. These rules will not be stated explicitly, so from these sample statements you should pay attention to what these parameters even are before attempting to tweak them. Studying past grant submissions (available in Resources) reveals these parameters, turning the writing process into a puzzle with visible constraints.

Organizing your Google Drive

This part is crucial. By October you will have a dozen drafts and five people commenting on them, and version control is what keeps this from turning into a mess.

Make three folders:

• Personal Statement
• Research Statement
• References

Personal Statement and Research Statement. Each holds the drafts of that essay. Every time you make significant changes, make a copy rather than editing in place, and index it:

yourname_personal_statement_1
yourname_personal_statement_2
…

Why the name in front? Because these drafts will go out to reviewers and you’ll want to keep your name there for their reference. Your drafts folder should eventually look something like this:

yourname_personal_statement_14_reviewer5name
yourname_personal_statement_15_reviewer6name
yourname_personal_statement_16
…

This formatting will let you have several people commenting on different copies of the draft on the same day. Then you will be able to fold all their notes into the next indexed version. This nomenclature also gamifies the thing a little — watching the index climb is a genuinely useful motivator.

References. This folder holds the copies of both statements that you share with your recommenders — one pair per mentor:

yourname_Personal_Statement_Mentor01
yourname_Research_Statement_Mentor01
yourname_Personal_Statement_Mentor02
yourname_Research_Statement_Mentor02
…

Share these with editing privileges and keep your own working copy in a different folder entirely. One pair per mentor means you can see and respond to each person’s comments without them colliding. Update these copies each time you finish an iteration.

More on choosing your recommenders and writing to them is here.

Resources

Read the current solicitation before anything else, because the details do move between cycles.

• NSF GRFP solicitation and application instructions

The two guides I leaned on most while writing:

• MIT CommKit — NSF research proposal
• MIT CommKit — NSF personal statement

And here is a spreadsheet of GRFP submission examples, which I referenced constantly while writing. You can filter these samples by field to see how prior writers have presented work like yours. You can also filter the materials by school which is useful for finding programs at your prospective institution which are worth naming in Broader Impacts.

• Writing your statements — on iteration & organizing drafts of your writing
• Requesting recommendation letters — how to reach out to your recommenders