It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a lot of people working together to get a grant. The fact that three years after starting a project basically from scratch we were awarded a NSF grant is quite a feat by any standards.
This was not our first, of course. We had applied for a couple of private foundations and to the California Sea Grant. One very important lesson from the failed applications was to request a call (if possible) with the grant administrators to learn what went wrong. Often we had the “who dis” problem, grant agencies not knowing us, and were recommended to seek collaborations with more seasoned institutions. One time, when we wrote our first course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) grant, we were told that more details were needed regarding the mechanics of the education research part. That was a huge help for the NSF grant.
For a timeline of how we started and expanded, there is our experiment.com website, where we got some crowdfunding and have kept updates. A relevant milestone was the collaboration with Dr. Jeff Bowman at Scripps, thanks to a connection with Dr. Emelia DeForce.
My university has an excellent grant specialist, who was and is in charge of all the boring details including the official paperwork and the gory budget forms. But a grant starts and ends with the narrative, and that was a tour de force. Especially because we had basically only one week to write it!
It was helpful that both Rachel Simmons and I are night owls so we were writing into the wee hours, often at the same time using Dropbox and Word online. Once we had a working draft, excellent collaborators and a writing consultant smoothed out the wrinkles and ensured we stayed within the page limits. Finding an external evaluator willing to write an evaluation plan in three days was also epic (short version: networking is critical).
The rest of it is history- waiting months, hearing back, rushing to get IRB approvals and write revisions. And then the news.
We have been rolling now officially since October. Three groups of students have completed the experience, new reagents are accumulating in the lab, and there is a paid research student in the lab. A week ago I had the pleasure to visit University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where a group of grantees presented their project and compared notes in a STEM meeting. It was heartwarming to be with a group of educators who feel very strongly about widening access to STEM for all students, especially Hispanics.
barralopolis 